Loom-a-room: turning the Maker-Space at the Omaha Children’s Museum into a loom!

A couple weeks ago we turned the entire Maker-Space at the Omaha Children’s Museum into a gigantic loom, letting kids wrap string all over our space to create a beautiful 3D structure! We kept the activity going for an entire week, and were delighted by just how far things went.

Construction begins

We began on Sunday by seeding our Maker-Space with lines of strings and inviting guests to help tie up more string. After a while we had enough of a structure that kids could just throw balls of yarn around and weaving them through the existing structure to create denser and more interesting forms.

Early on we let kids have access to a few piles of glittery tape, but very quickly we realized that this was a terrible idea. Instead of weaving individual strands of this tape through the structure, they were just taking handfuls and tossing it on top of the whole thing, creating a huge, ugly mass of material that made it much more difficult to weave anything else through. We cut it all out and stored it away and let kids only use yarn from that point on.

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Final day

After a week of growth, this structure was truly something to behold. Spanning a ridiculous 1,300 sq. ft. of floor, this structure ended up being so complex and interesting that no photos or videos can really do it justice.

Tear down

At the end of the week we started tearing down the structure, expecting it to take quite a while. However, we quickly found that the entire structure was held up by a surprisingly small number of important lines, which, once cut, made the entire structure fall in under an hour!

We rolled up the yarn into a ball and placed it on a table, planning to bundle it all together and hang it from the ceiling in the future.

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Death

This past weekend, it seems that the custodians decided to take action and threw out the entire ball of yarn! Looks like we won’t be hanging it up after all! Good thing we took lots of photos!