About 4 years ago, I worked at a primary school and one of the students I supported randomly got interested in using a weaving loom. Our teacher librarian was known to set things up on a table that sat outside in the hallway, and I would frequent this table every day with this particular student for one of his breaks during the day. One day, she had set up a simple weaving loom and a few different colours of yarn and had started the first piece of yarn.  The student was intrigued by the set up, as he always was, and sat down at the table. I took a piece of yarn and started showing him how to thread it through the loom,over and under, over and under. It took him just a few short minutes to figure out how to do it on his own, and he was hooked!

For about the next month, we visited that table every day, and the librarian was great in keeping the materials out for him so he could continue from the day before. By the end of the school year, he had made a few small pieces of woven wall hangings. One was hung up in the library, one he gave to his mom. I found out that I really enjoyed the time we spent together working with the loom and ended up buying a small loom of my own, got some yarn, took a book out of the library to learn some new techniques…. .then life got busy.

Hearing about this project, I knew exactly that this was the direction I wanted to go in. Every few months, when I feel like I have some extra time on my hands, I think about loom weaving, and how I really wanted to start up a project of my own, but something always gets in the way.

Photo by Evelyn Gregory

This is my opportunity to pick it up and give myself permission to be creative and revisit something that I really enjoyed learning about. I don’t feel like I am an overly artistic creative person, but for some reason I really gravitated towards loom weaving.

I went into my storage area and found the basket of all the supplies I had gotten when I was first inspired by that experience with my student years ago. There it was, just tucked away in the back corner of the closet, waiting for me to finally do something with all that yarn! I also found some macrame string in that basket as well, which is also another thing I was looking into trying alongside loom weaving. This feels like the perfect opportunity to dust everything off and finally get started. Stay tuned!