3D Printed Loom

August 6, 2017 ProgressTH We've designed and built a 3D printed rigid heddle loom. It is a tool used by hobbyists for weaving yarn into fabric and is a great way to understand the basic principles behind how more complex looms work and learn the craft of weaving itself.

It is the first step toward an automated tabletop loom aimed at enhancing localized textile production.

This 3D printed rigid heddle loom is the first step toward making textile production more accessible. Work on perfecting the current loom design, producing accessories such as loom shuttles and reed hooks, and development of an automated tabletop loom will follow.  

The loom is about half a meter by half a meter in dimensions allowing you to weave patterns up to 400mm wide and with the warp beam system, a half meter or more in length.

The loom costs approximately 400 THB (12 USD) in PLA plastic filament to 3D print. Additional parts include approximately 3.5 meters of cheap 22mm PVC pipe and a handful of common nuts and bolts.

Because the design is opensource (all files and instructions are available here on Thingiverse), anyone can access the SketchUp design files and modify or expand on it as long as they share it too.

Why Build a 3D Printed Loom? 

We built this loom to answer the questions: where do the clothes we wear everyday come from, and is it possible to localize their production?

Makers Taking on Textiles

July 9, 2017 ProgressTH Many great ideas from the maker movement and toward localization center around new, technologically-enabled takes on once localized crafts that have been centralized through massive industrialization. One of these crafts, weaving, is particularly interesting.

We go through our daily lives ensconced in the textiles we wear, shielded by them in our windows from the sun at day, and covered by them in our beds at night. Yet we rarely give thought about where they come from and how they are made.

Massive automated machines (modern looms) weave textiles together by alternating the heights of threads lengthwise while other threads are passed through width-wise. The video below shows a highly automated process moving so quickly that the human eye can scarcely see what is actually taking place.

Such machines represent the pinnacle of textile production, the most efficient means yet of producing fabric, built up on centuries of techniques and technologies developed around the world to cloth ourselves, decorate our homes, and cover our beds.

Understanding Modern Looms By Studying Traditional Hand Looms 

To understand how we arrived at this highly centralized and industrialized process and how we might leverage technology to put it back into the hands of local artists and designers, we visited The Loom (Facebook here), a weaving shop located in downtown Bangkok at The Gateway, Ekkamai.