DIY Band Weaving Box Loom Made from a Repurposed Magazine Rack

My DIY Upcycled Box Loom. 

I've been coveting some of the old antique box looms that use a rigid heddle for making woven tape.


Eleanor Brittle in Hershey, Pennsylvania, with a wonderful collection of old tape looms, and she'll tell you about them all in this 3-part series    Part 2    Part 3

Rather than buying one (They can be quite expensive ...), I thought there might be a way to make one myself, full well knowing I don't have the skills or tools to make a really nice hand-crafted one.  Sigh!   Another DIY project ...

I thought the arched tombstone heddle would be tricky to make from a woodworking POV, and didn't want to ask my husband to make this one more item.     Making a box out of wood was beyond my skills, and not the way I wanted to spend my limited free time.  But I thought there's got to be a way to make one out of an existing wooden box, or drawer ...   Often when you see those box looms, the heddle has the silhouette of a tombstone, and doubles as the cover to the box when not in use.




Low and behold, I found this upcycled band weaving loom video by Noreen Crone Findlay.   She also has a blog post about this project.  I've seen her before, and even built other DIY looms based on her instructions.     I love the upcycling and DIY ideas she shares.    I thought this was just the thing!    I didn't want to make the wooden pall and ratchet, though -- I thought those could easily be purchased as hardware necessities, along with wooden dowels.  This video was the inspiration, though as you'll see, we made some of our own modifications ...

Here's an even simpler box loom someone made on Ravelry.  I've also seen the Swedish cradle looms that are similar.   I think that's more of what Noreen Crone Findlay's Upcycled Band Loom is based on.

Possible candidates:
I've been on the hunt for a suitable wooden box for this project ...   It's too early for people to be putting dressers and desks on the curb where I might pick up a suitable desk drawer.

As a Librarian-by-day, I had access to an old card catalog drawer.  This seemed like a good possibility, but as the project developed in my mind, it wasn't quite the right shape.  The low, long and narrow might work better for card weaving, so the hunt continued ...

Thrift Store Magazine Rack

I went to the local St. Vinny's and found some candidates. This one must have been a magazine rack back in it's hey-day.  I thought the tall sides mimicked the shape and feel of those old box looms in the video above, even if I knew I would NOT be cutting the slits in the tombstone sides.  As I cleaned it up and examined it further, the short sides are not the same height, and the bottom piece is not square.  And there's a noticeable twist to one of the sides.  This must have been someone's wood working project -- made by loving hands.  It's much nicer than the birdhouse I made in junior high!  Good enough for me to take it to the next level with this DIY box loom project.

Looking down into the "box" before any alterations were made.

Here's the list of hardware we had to pick up to make this miraculous transformation:

2 pawl & ratchets

wooden dowels

Hinge

screws

washers

wooden thread spools

drawer pull

We did eventually decide to cut off both of those tall sides,  but we re-instated one of them as a fold-down cover and as a way to lift the warp higher so you could work at an angle -- sort of like on the inkle loom.  We used a drawer pull to redirect the warp towards the top of the tombstone side.   This way, I could take advantage of the wooden box which seemed to be about the right size for this project, but by raising up the weaving work surface, I could also use a wider heddle that would be too big to dip down into the box.

Sleeping / Resting Mode with the tall side folded down for storage.

That side is attached with 2 hinges that allow it to fold over the top of the box as a cover when not in use.  But that also necessitated that we find a way to make it stable when it is upright, so my husband designed a simple wood block that stays out of the way of the warp path.  This involved some amount of fiddling, since that part of the wood had a marked warped twist in it, that we hadn't noticed earlier.  It might have been better to keep the other side?     But then again -- most of this box was out of square and uneven.  [Next time, my husband says he'll just start by building his own box -- then it would be square and true.  Still this gave him a number of challenges and problems to solve--which is good for exercising his brain.]

The beautiful cherry pawls and ratchets: I purchased these from Cranky Crab wood working shop on Etsy.  This was well worth the price to have someone else make this bit of needed infrastructure.  The quicker to get weaving!  I think the dowels my husband chose for the warp and cloth beams are from an old shovel or a broom handle.  Beefy sticks, and recycled, too.  

Resting Mode - View from the top.

You can tell the box wasn't square to start with, but my DH made it work.  

You can have it warped with a project and fold it down for storage or portability.

It's a nice feature, based on using what we started with to the fullest.

Instead of the wooden spools to lift the breast beam, CL cut out some "feet" to match what was on the bottom of the box.  The dowel rests on that, and allows a space for the woven cloth tape to travel back down to the cloth beam in the box below.

Here's the view looking down into the box from the top.

You can see the warp and cloth beams respectively.

 

Here's the little Tree of Life thingie we attached to the front of it.
Gives it personality and hearkens back to the wood it's made from.

Now to get to the weaving ...   which leads to the next question.  How to lash on with those shoelaces?  I wasn't the only one wondering that, so NCF made a little video to demonstrate.

Here it is all warped up and ready to weave ...

Easy Peasy!

I was going to call this loom the Crone-Findlay Loom, just because I like the crone part of the name, denoting Wise Woman, but we've made enough modifications of our own, that I'd have to call it the Modified Crone Loom, or something ....  ;-)

Again, many thanks to my Sweet Husband CL for his help, suggestions, problem-solving and assistance and precious weekend time in transforming this wooden magazine rack into a workable box loom.  We make a good team!