Beginning Beading on a Loom

I have been a bit intrigued by loom beading for a while now, I really thought that the effects you could achieve were really stunning but difficult. I even went so far one year as to ask for a loom for Christmas, unfortunately I was bought an enormous weaving loom which made me panic! So I took it upon myself to buy an Indian hand loom off of Amazon for not much money and it arrived with a supply of needles, thread and beads. I strung the thing up and left it sitting on the windowsill for about a week, just sitting there judging me and my lack of bead looming skills. To say I was intimidated by it was an understatement, the whole thing seemed to be so difficult to use that I might need the Rosetta Stone of crafting to approach it. Thankful the local library had just the thing, Dorothy Wood's 'Beaders Bible'. This book was my saviour in the looming department, it has tutorials in loom beading and off loom beading which are pretty simple to follow. So I set about starting my project and discovered that this was actually really easy. I started with twelve strings but very quickly started to run out of beads, so I restrung the loom with seven threads which I'm not sure but I think this is the warp. I decided I wanted a summery colour scheme to go with the season so used blue orange and white.

I thought starting small would be a good idea, just beading a 6x6 square or two, and then I realised that I hadn't left much length on the threads to be sewn in and there were going to be more bits of thread than beads in the finished product. But that didn't stop me as I had an idea forming, take the little squares and put them on lengths of silver chain, what could be more summery than that? Here is the finished product.

I'm really glad I tried loom beading, I have really enjoyed it and will be trying a slightly larger project next time. I definately would recommend it to anyone. It just goes to show that with the right information/teacher/tutorial it is possible to achieve things you thought impossible.


I didn't find any great tutorials out there on Youtube, a lot of them are long winded or are trying to sell you something. Here is an ok one with videos of off loom tutorials in the sidebar, worth a look and a save if you're getting into beading.