Knitting Looms

It's actually pretty amazing to take a look at all of the different ways people put strings together to make cloth. There are such a wide variety of different types of looms and other techniques I can't even begin to understand. It is actually just a little mind-boggling to say the least. But even though there are million dollar machines that can make five bagillion socks an hour, and other machines that can produce oodles of cloth a minute, all of them are based on a few pretty simple principles and the old knitting loom is one of them.

Knitting and looms have been around since before there were Pharoes in Egypt, and that's like a really, really long time. There was even an egyptian goddess of knitting more than 5,000 years ago (she also showed up for wars, but it seems like all the demigods in Egypt had to moonlight from time to time). And if you can figure out how to knit when all you've got is a couple of sticks of wood and a bunch of smaller sticks that you can smooth a bit with your bronze knife, what you end up with is a small hand loom. Te great thing is that you can make almost anything on one.

If you've ever tried to make anything round with knitting needles, such as socks and hats, you will soon figure out just how complex it can be knitting in the round with multiple needles. To make it worse, the needles are pointed on both ends, which makes it even trickier to keep everything in place and flowing smoothly. Knitting with needles also leads to lopsided creations until you get a feel for keeping things straight and true, and even then you'll end up having to block most things to square them up and even them out. But since a knitting loom is, quite simply, a bunch of evenly spaced pegs, it tends to create much more symmetrical things quite naturally.

Knitting looms can also be used to make anything you can find a pattern for. It might take you a couple of sessions to figure out how to do certain stitches, like knit and purl, but once you figure that out you can make anything from any knitting pattern, even if the pattern was created for needle knitting. A loom is simply fantastic for larger projects such as blankets. You can even make really big blankets by knitting large blocks and then stitching them together.

In part 2 we'll discuss just how much easier knitting looms are than other methods of knitting.