By Nancy Ellison

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in The Spinning Wheel Sleuth, #130, January 2026, and is reprinted with permission.

A box loom with the date of 1849 and a name decoratively painted on it was in the collection of the Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum in Decorah, IA, for some time before more was learned about its background and the original use for that type of loom. Not a plain box, the loom has sides cut at a sloping angle and the top cut with decorative scallops. Museum staff remarked that it looked like a cute doll bed, started calling it the “cradle loom,” and the name stuck.

According to the museum’s records, the inscription on the front says “Beiret Colbiön Datter B” [Photo #1] and “1849” on the back [Photo #2]. The owner was probably Beret Colbjørnsdatter Rund, who was born in 1828 in Krødsherad in southern Norway. She emigrated in 1851. She and Ole Blekeberg married, and she died in 1910 in Decorah, IA.

Lila Nelson (1922-2015) was curator of textiles at Vesterheim from 1964 to her retirement in 1991. In the 1970s she engaged the help of woodworkers to make cradle looms based on this 1849 loom with some modifications. The unfinished looms were for sale at the museum store.

One of the woodworkers was Merlin Lee, a retired pharmacist in Zumbrota, MN. He also made various Norwegian-styled chests, benches, cupboards, candle holders, and more for the museum store. People bought wooden items for rosemaling (a traditional Norwegian-style of folk painting) and other folk arts such as wood carving. Cradle looms are challenging to make with slanted sides. Early ones were made with dovetailed joins. Merlin Lee said that it was tricky to cut the notches in the ratchets for the ratchet-and-pawl tension system on the front and back beams. I remember one time when he said, “Mrs. Nelson thought we should also offer a larger size, so people could do larger weavings on cradle looms.”

I bought several cradle looms from Merlin Lee. The loom I had painted blue was an earlier smaller one. It is 11” long and 9” wide at the bottom and 15” long and 9” wide at the top. It is 8” high [Photo #3]. The unpainted one, with the rigid-heddle pick-up band, measures 11” by 10½” at the bottom,15” long and 10½” wide at the top, and 8” high. I also have a large cradle loom that is 11” long, 13½” wide at the bottom, 15” long and 13½” wide at the top, and 8″ high.

In 1977 Lila Nelson wrote a 27-page booklet about cradle looms that included some history about the geometric slit-tapestry bands that were originally woven on them. She also gave ideas for weavers to try other uses of the handy little looms such as weaving small tapestries using string heddles and a shed rod, using it as a rigid-heddle loom, or using it for card or tablet weaving.

Norwegians have a long tradition of weaving bands in decorative pick-up techniques with a rigid heddle back-strap style loom, but it is handy to tension the warp in a loom such as the cradle loom, although that was not historically done.

I took several classes in various Norwegian weave structures from Lila Nelson. I also saw her at meetings of the Scandinavian Weavers Study Group. She was a close friend of my aunt.

Weavers find the cradle looms handy to carry along to weave away from home. It is self- contained, with room in it to take along scissors, shuttles, extra yarn, and so on with no chances of items falling out of the solid bottom. I once heard Lila Nelson mention that there is room to weave on a cradle loom on your lap while in the passenger seat of a car. She sometimes wove on a cradle loom while her husband was driving.

Evidence has been found of looms of this type in Germany in the 1600s, and it is thought to have spread from there to Norway. It was not widespread in Norway but just found in a few southernprovinces. There was no shedding device originally on the looms as the weaving done was little squares over 2-, 3- , or 4-warp threads as in kilim weaving. It is a very slow and time-consuming weaving technique. A needle was found to be handier than a shuttle. It reminds me of one of the steps in hardanger embroidery where squares are needle-woven in. The designs go with colors in stair-step fashion, so there are no long slits anywhere and the slits are barely noticeable. The squares are not interlocked as they are in some other Scandinavian weaves.

Vesterheim has an apron with a decorative band of slit tapestry weaving sewn on at the bottom. It is pictured on the cover of the cradle loom weaving booklet. The 1977 booklet was redone in color in the second edition in 2018. Vesterheim has only two other old pieces woven in that technique that are hanging near the 1849 loom in the display case. For about the last 20 years Mike and Becky Lusk of Lusk Scandia Woodworks in Coon Valley, WI, have supplied the cradle looms for the Vesterheim museum store. They offer a small loom, 16” long, 10” wide, and 8” tall; and a large one that is 16” long, 14” wide, and 8” tall. Mike says, “We have seen interest in cradle looms greatly increase the last few years as more people find out about them. We even have had orders from some other countries such as Great Britain, Czechoslovakia, and the Netherlands.”

Vesterheim is the oldest and largest museum of any ethnic immigrant group in the United.States. There are thousands of items in the main museum building and an open-air museum including buildings made by Norwegian immigrants in pioneer days. Also some log buildings from Norway have been taken apart and moved here. Vesterheim has a highly regarded folk-art school where weekend and weeklong classes are available.

Addendum from the author:

Marta Hoffman’s book, Fra Fiber til Tøy: Tekstilredskaper og bruken av dem i Norsk tradisjon (Textile Equipment and its Use in Norwegian Tradition, Landsbruksforlaget, 1991), has a little about a similar loom and the slit tapestry bands (p. 167-168), including a pattern that could be 15 warps with 3 ends per square. This description was included in a caption. “Box loom for weaving kilim bands. Heddles are not used, the shed is picked up by hand. There are slits between the different colours of the weft. The warp spacer was not used traditionally. Similar box looms are known from European pattern books dated to the 16th and 17th centuries, and bands of the same technique – in silk and gold thread – can be found on medieval vestments.”

That is the pattern I have on my blue cradle loom.  I have done it with 10 warps with 2 per square. 

Nancy Nodland Ellison is a former home economics teacher who has been spinning and weaving since the late 1960’s.  Her studio which is filled with spinning wheels and looms takes up half of the barn on her farm at Zumbrota, Minnesota.  She recently wrote her memoir entitled Belle Creek and Beyond.  Her website is www.ellisonsheepfarm.com

Editor’s note: Lila Nelson was responsible for the burst of interest in the cradle loom in the Midwest. This is a photo from around 2005 of one of Lila’s cradle looms along with a band she wove on it.

To see several Norwegian versions of the cradle loom, click on this search of the Digitaltmuseum.no (the Norwegian Digital Museum) for the Norwegian term: bandestol. This cradle loom is from the Hallingdal Museum, as pictured in the Norwegian Digital Library.

Resources

Nelson, Lila. Using the Norwegian Cradle Loom. Revised 2018 edition in color. Based on original 1977 publication. (Order from the Vesterheim Store.)

Lusk Scandia Woodworks, N906 County Rd. PI, Coon Valley, WI. (608) 452-3472. Luskscandiaww@yahoo.com,

Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum, 520 W. Water St., Decorah, Iowa 52101. (563) 382-9681. https://vesterheim.org/

Author’s note: Thanks to Laurann Gilbertson, Chief Curator at Vesterheim, for the pictures