How to Make an Easy Knitting Loom (Tutorial)

This tutorial is now available in PDF format.

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The Most Versatile Portable and Easy to Use Knitting Loom Ever

NOTE: I have put together a starter kit with 16-64 pegs, rubberbands and spacer beads. Just email me at the address is in my profile for details. If you want to try making a knitting board, I can throw in some wooden dowels and more rubberbands.

You'll need the following to create your own flexible loom:

- Pegs Any of the following will work:

• Pick-up Sticks (fine - small gauge)
• Swizzel/cocktail stirring sticks (medium - large)
• Pencils or Ball-point Pen barrels (large - extra large)

- Small Rubberbands

- Spacers - optional.

- Knitting Tool - optional.

- Wooden dowels or pen barrels - optional for Double-Knit.

Here is what I used for my current loom:




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Here is my current loom being used as a knitting board to knit a scarf in a mix of e-wrap and double-knit.

To read/see more of it's progress, click here.

I've been experimenting with different materials to make a finer gauge knitting loom for socks. And, I've come up with a decent idea. I tried bamboo BBQ skewers, but they splinter and are pointy at the end. So, I found some of those cheap plastic "pick-up sticks" from the old game with the knobbed ends at an online party supply store. My daughter needed trinkets for her holiday party, so we bought a huge lot of them.

I used small hair rubberbands (real rubber, NOT the new plastic kind that break) and plastic beads with large enough holes for the rubberband to go through. The beads aren't necessary. Twisting the rubberbands inbetween the sticks will produce smaller spacing. I joined one row of rubberband near the top and one near the bottom to keep the loom stable. This is all that is required for knitting in-the-round or flat panel.

To double-knit, I added ball point pen barrels taped together to stiffen the sides and two rubberbands to each end of the loom with spacers to change the distance between the two rake sides. Since the scarf is fairly wide, I also added some paint sticks I had to help stiffen the center even more to prevent it from bowing under stress. NOTE: This loom should not be wrapped too tightly, or bowing will increase.

Earlier attempt at "pick-up stick" loom showing decreasing:

Read/See more about this loom experiment, click here.

Click here to see my other attempts at creating this loom.

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The last thing I really need to experiment with is how wide I can make the loom before it starts falling apart. So far, when the rubberbands are tight, it holds together really well for hat/scarf sized projects. The largest I have attempted so far is an 8" scarf with 64 pegs, which makes the loom about 13" long.