One of the crafts that my wife enjoys is weaving. She has a small tabletop loom that she bought several years ago and last year I made her an inkle loom so she can make bracelets and webbing.

There is also the craft of using very small looms that are just for hand weaving small patches. She bought a set of these a while ago and while they are nice, they are sort of expensive for what they are. Especially if you want multiple different sizes or a size that you can’t find for sale.

I had read that it is very easy to engrave and laser cut designs from an SVG file. A friend of mine has a laser cutter and he agreed to cut samples of SVGs that I generated. Hence LaserLoom was born.

There were a few pratfalls along the way because of rendering differences between the image viewer on Ubuntu (where I was verifying my output) and his software for controlling the cutter but in the end we got everything to work.

LaserLoom is a parameterized SVG generator that can make 2 different styles of hand looms in any size and tooth pitch. Right now it is just a command line tool but I can easily imagine making a web frontend for it or even just rewriting in Javascript.

It was a fun exercise and of course I spent way more time on it than was probably warranted but I learned some stuff about SVG and was able to make something to support my wife’s hobby.