Many of us like to use small looms we can carry around or weave tapestry on on our laps. A few years ago I made this video for a blog post that Schacht Spindle Company did about their peg looms. In the video I show you how to warp these looms with uneven spacing to get the sett you want.*

The Schacht peg looms come with a rather odd sett of about 5.5 ends per inch and for weaving small, that doesn’t work for me most of the time. Often I warp these looms with a 1, 2, 1, 2 pattern to get 8-9 ends per inch or doubled to get about 11.

I recently got one of the new Mirrix 10 inch Chloe looms. If you’ve been watching Change the Shed you can see me weaving on it there. In this post there is a video where I set up this loom including changing out the rods and sett combs. I also have more to say about what I think about this loom.

I have been weaving on the Schacht Arras tapestry loom for several years now. They have released a stand and treadle assembly for the loom which I have been using for most of a year now and I really love it.

The treadles don’t work without the stand so you do have to purchase both the stand and the treadle assembly to make the whole thing work. The treadles are manual meaning that they work with a pulley system and don’t need to be plugged in. They glide easily and are very quiet.

How many years have we been using Mirrix looms now? For me it has been at least 15 and for some of you it has been much longer! A classic Mirrix loom is a really fancy pipe loom. These looms are sturdy and they hold as tight a tension as you want them to. They have a shedding device and you can swap out the spacing spring at the top of the loom to help you create different setts easily.

Did you know you can replace the bottom spring in an active warp when you start a new tapestry?

I’ve written about tapestry looms and my smaller tapestry diary works quite a lot on this blog.* One of my most popular blog posts is from 2019 about small tapestry looms. The information in that post is now outdated and most of the looms I was talking about are not even available any more. So let’s look at some newer options for small looms and why you might choose one over another!

If you’re a tapestry weaver who does smaller format work, you’ve likely at least heard of Mirrix looms. I’m guessing you probably have one in your studio. The classic looms that are rectangular in shape and have a shedding device also come with a funny-shaped handle to shift the shed. If you’re new to this sort of shedding device, the way this handle works can be a little mysterious.