I found this miniature hand loom at an estate sale. The previous owner had abandoned a project after hardly any progress, so it came to me with a head start and a supply of yarn.

The original instructions had even been preserved. A notation on the back of the instructions indicates that it’s a product of Karbercraft Co. in Northport NY and that it dates from 1964. The instructions note that finished squares can be joined to make afghans, blankets, stoles . . . and skirts. (I am trying to picture this.)

Here is the loom out of the box and ready for action. The previous owner had already strung the warp threads and woven a few rows (the weft).

Like a full-sized loom, the Wonder Weave provides a means (the heddle) to raise or lower every other warp thread so each row can be woven by simply passing the shuttle (a needle-like object in this case) between the stationary threads and the raised or lowered threads. Here the heddle is lowering half the threads. You can see the shuttle passing through.

Here the heddle is raising the threads for a new row.

Making progress . . .

Almost finished. Raising and lowering the heddle and squeezing the shuttle through gets a little challenging at the end.

To remove the finished square from the hand loom, first the warp threads need to be slipped out of the holes at the ends of the heddle prongs, which can be easily done through slits in the prongs. Next, the metal bars at the sides of the loom are lifted out and the loops at the ends of the weft threads slid off. Finally, the loops at the ends of the warp threads are detached from the hooks at the ends of the loom. Here’s the finished square.

The empty loom . . . ready to start a new square. Here you can see the needle-shuttle clearly.

I was especially delighted to find the Wonder Weave hand loom because I realized it was an example of the device on which two of my earlier Yarn Mania finds had been created. The first was the subject of my February 21, 2018, post, “Vintage Woven-Square Blanket.” Here’s the blanket and here’s the post.

The second, from June 12, 2022, was “So Sweet–Woven-Square Baby Blanket.” Here’s the blanket and here’s the post.

A visitor to the website emailed me in response to the first of these posts to tell me that the squares in the blanket were likely made on a “Weave-It” hand loom, manufactured by Hero Manufacturing Company in Middleboro, MA. The Weave-It hand loom was apparently a rival of the Wonder Weave hand loom, but curiously the previous owner of my Wonder Weave loom had also stored in the Wonder Weave box a page of instructions from the Weave-It loom.