Most people could probably tell you two things about me:
- I stan a knitting gauge swatch.
- Commitment freaks me out.
Which is how I ended up making two-inch looms and selling them on the internet.
The short version
A swatch loom is a small frame loom, about two inches square, that you warp by hand and weave with a needle. It holds enough yarn to make a small finished piece, the size of a small patch, and it takes about twenty minutes start to finish.
It's primarily a sampling tool. It's also, for a lot of people, the first loom they ever use, because the barrier to trying it is close to zero.
If you already knit, crochet, or cross-stitch, the motion will feel familiar. Weaving on a swatch loom sits somewhere between embroidery, cross-stitch, and simple colorwork. You're working with a needle, a grid, and color decisions, and the structure builds up in quick, neat rows.
It also runs on whatever you already have. A two-inch swatch takes a few yards, which means the leftovers you can't do anything else with are exactly the right amount. Sock yarn ends, the last of a skein, mini skeins from a club you never used, embroidery floss, that one ball of something you bought because of the color and then never committed to. All of it works here. This is the rare project where the scrap pile is the point rather than the problem.
What it's for
Warping a floor loom takes hours of both physical and mental work. There's math involved (gross) and its surprisingly hard on your back. Warping a rigid heddle takes less effort, but it still takes time. Both of those are a real commitment to a set of decisions you made before you had any evidence of whether you like the finished project or not.
A swatch loom lets you make the decision after.
Three things a swatch will tell you:
Whether the colors do what you think they do. Colors behave differently in cloth than they do on the cone. Two yarns that look great side by side can go muddy once they're crossing each other every pass. I've had this happen more than once with variegated yarn, where the color changes fight the threading pattern and the whole thing turns to soup even though the weave structure is dead simple.
Whether the sett is right. Sett is how many threads per inch you're packing into the warp. Too open and the cloth is floppy and feels fragile. Too tight and it's stiff. You can calculate it, and you should, but the calculation is a starting guess. Weaving two inches of it tells you whether the guess was right. Once you have a starting point from your first swatch, you can decide whether to open up the sett a bit or weave more densely to affect your finished fabric.
Whether you're into it. This is the underrated one, but maybe the most important. Sometimes you get two inches in (less, for me) and realize you don't want eight more feet of it. That's a good outcome. That's the swatch doing its job. Failing fast is so much better than failing slow.
Why these exist
I didn't set out to make a product. I set out to stop wasting warp.
After a few scarves that turned out "meh" I got paralyzed by the idea of making a WHOLE THING just to hate it in the end. I needed to answer some questions upfront: Does this palette work? Is 12 EPI right for this yarn and project? Will this threading read at all, or is it going to disappear into itself? I tried using larger frame looms but got frustrated 2" into a 4-6" square. I needed something faster (yes, I am very impatient).
I wanted something small, exact, and not particularly precious so that I wouldn't feel bad about throwing them away. I wanted a place to prototype freely. I started on cardboard, but it wasn't precise enough.
So we 3D printed one. Then we printed it again, because the first version didn't include a channel and it needed one for the needle to weave through the very last few rows. We designed them to be flexible so that even though I only had three reed sizes so far, the design could scale when I bought more.
I shared a photo on Instagram, and brought them to a drop-in at my weaver's guild. Other people started asking where to get one. It turned out I was solving a problem for more than just me. That part took longer to believe than it should have.
How they're made
I print these on a Bambu Labs P1S in my home in Durham, NC. Each loom takes about 10m to print and uses a ridiculously small amount of filament, something like 5g, which is the whole point. They're not precious. I have a cubby full of them, and when I want to test something I grab one and warp it instead of thinking about whether it's worth using one up.
Two inches is small enough to weave in one sitting and large enough that structure is legible. Plain weave, twill, overshot, complex color combinations like log cabin and shadow weave: all of them read clearly enough at two inches to tell you whether to keep going down that path or not.
Swatch looms currently come in a few dent sizes, which matches the sett options I have across my floor loom and rigid heddle (and the most common sizes out there, generally). A 10-dent loom takes worsted or DK weight comfortably. A 12-dent handles fingering, and it's the one to reach for if you're weaving with embroidery floss or Sashiko thread. The 7.5-dent takes bulkier yarn and stands up to a chunky handspun weft. Which one you reach for depends entirely on what's already in your stash.
What you can do with a finished swatch
The honest answer is that for me, as someone weaving professionally, a lot of them stay in their dedicated case, with tags attached detailing the specs (date, sett, warp and weft yarns).
I've started to also display them as tiny works of art around my house, which brings me a lot of joy. But, if you're set on finding more specific utility, the two-inch squares also work as:
- Visible mending patches, stitched onto a knee or an elbow
- Coasters, if you weave a few in the same palette
- Ornaments and gift tags
- Patchwork, joined into something larger
- A record of what you tried, which is still my favorite thing
Where to start
Swatch looms are here. They come in three dent sizes, or an assorted set if you want to try all of them.
If you've never woven anything, a swatch loom and a needle and whatever yarn is closest to you is enough. There's no shuttle, no tie-up, no tensioning system to fight. You warp it, you weave over and under, you take it off. I've got long-form instructions and videos on the Start page, and every kit comes with a quick-start illustrated booklet.
If you already weave, you probably already know what you'd use this for, and you're probably annoyed you've been warping a whole rigid heddle to answer questions that take twenty minutes.
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