Peg Loom

These are some peg looms I made as presents. A peg loom is a very simple type of loom that can be used for making things like rugs. My design uses two lengths of oak as the base and a set of sapele dowels as pegs.

Each loom is split into two lengths: for narrow rugs one or other of the shorter sections can be used but for wider creations the two can be joined together.

This photo shows one half of one of the peg looms with loops of string tied into the holes in each of the pegs. This allows the loom to be used with much wider yarn than would be possible if you had to thread the yarn through the hole in the peg.

This photo shows how the loom looks when joined together. The two pieces were made out of the same piece of oak, so the grain continues from one to the next. The lengths of the bodies has been arranged such that the pegs are at a consistent pitch when the two parts are joined together. To ensure that the holes were at a consistent spacing, I made a simple chain drilling jig and used it to drill the peg holes.

In the side of each component are some 8 mm holes, drilled through. These can be used with some low-cost table clamps to hold the loom in place.

As I was making the looms as presents, I also made a couple of simple boxes to hold the pegs when the loom is not in use.

This photo shows the loom in use. Long lengths of yarn are threaded through the peg loops and then chunky yarn or fabric is threaded back and forth along the loom. When the weft gets near the top of the pins, the pins are pulled out of their holes in the base and up through the woven rug. They're then inserted back into the holes in the base and the weaving can continue.

This photo shows a simple example of a rug that has been made (by my mother) on one of my looms.

There's no limit to the length of the rug that can be made on the peg loom. The width is limited by the length of the peg loom's body (although multiple bodies could be placed together so in theory the four sections that I made could be turned into one very wide loom!) This photo shows a simple set up for weaving a very large rug (the wooden board at the front of the picture is there to stop the warp yarn from getting tangled up.

This photo shows the finished rug from the previous set-up (again made by my mother). For a sense of scale, it is 2.3 metres long.

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