A Fledgling Knitter: Loom Knitting 101

Hello everyone! My name is Adrian. My dear friend Isela recently introduced me to loom knitting, and we thought it could be useful, educational, and probably pretty entertaining for me to document and share my learning curve along the way. Over the next few months you will be hearing from me about the hiccups, the troubles, the funny stories, and the lessons (life or knitting) that crop up. I’ll try to keep the inspirational quotes to a minimum, but when the mood strikes…!

I’ll give you a tiny introduction before I tell you about my first day on a knitting loom. I have been crafting of some sort since I was a child. I grew up in a very crafty environment in a family of people whose hands were always busy. My father’s family are long-standing “mountain people” who are never idle while we sit and “visit.” So, it was extremely common to always have something in my hands to work on or play with while talking, riding in the car, watching tv, or just intentionally sitting and crafting together on a rainy afternoon. I learned to crochet from my Aunt Jane when very young, and did loads and loads of cross-stitch over the years. My mother is a phenomenally talented and world-renowned hand weaver and seamstress with a lovely home studio where I was lucky enough to receive all sorts of “lessons”. Needless to say, there has been fiber and yarn around me my entire life. It was always easy to find some sort of project around to keep me busy. However, despite all of this, I have never tried my hand at loom knitting, so here we are!

Step 1: open loom. I picked the 10” Knitting board to play with first. It’s small enough to take with me places, or just hold in my lap while watching tv. Rather than immediately jump into a specific project, I just thought I would play around with a loom to see what it felt like and get comfortable with all the pieces. I’ll be really honest with you guys here… My ego got knocked down a peg right away. Not because this is an overly complicated process, but because I was a bit too arrogant and thought I knew what I was doing without really, fully reading the directions. Well that wasn’t the best choice. Just because I’ve done other crafts doesn’t exempt me from reading the very straight-forward, helpful instructions, haha! I know, we all learn that in kindergarten, but sometimes we all need a reminder. So, lesson #1… don’t forget the anchor yarn. This is what happens when you think you don’t need it:

Loops everywhere! No way to straighten it out! Eep! The anchor yarn is really important to be able to pull the knitting down through the center and even out all the stitches. So I pulled it out to start again.

After casting on again, with an anchor yarn this time, and tugging gently down on the anchor yarn between rows, everything looks much better! Yes, I know this is basic… but really… sometimes those are the easiest things to screw up.

I continued knitting in plain stockinette all the way around for a few more rounds. I started to see as my knitting got long enough to extend below the loom that something wasn’t right! My bottom edge was longer and looser on one side than the other.

Luckily, with this situation I found an answer on the frequently asked questions from Kblooms.com: “This happens when the end stitches are larger at one end from the other. This is very easy to correct. When you hook your stitches over, be sure to work from one end towards the center of the knitting, and then change to the other end and knit towards the center. Be sure to loop over all the stitches. Do the same thing to the other board. Be sure to vary the spot that you change direction so that you do not create loose stitches in center. The center does not need to be exact so vary it with each new row.”

After reading that, I kept going with another dozen or so rows, changing each time where I started moving my loops and everything sorted out quite nicely. After changing my method for the next rows, I now can’t even tell which side was too long. I decided that after this initial “testing” of loom knitting, I want to now get cracking on a project that I will want to keep… but that will be the next post.

All around, I’m pretty pleased with my first foray into loom knitting! The first row or two were hard for me, but I very quickly picked up a rhythm for my hand, and comfort with the board, and a better understanding of how knitting itself works, particularly knitting double layer fabric like I was here. On to bigger and better adventures/projects/lessons in the next post!