This weekend's crafting distraction has mainly featured loom made flowers.

I was looking around the internet on Monday looking for inspiration on craft-based gift ideas for young girls when I stumbled across a page of information about flower looms. These looked like they were a) right up this little girls street and b) quite easy and quick to make without involving too much adult assistance. So, I found a supplier on eBay and ordered a couple - one for me, one for her.

They arrived on Friday and I've had 5 experiments so far, trying to work out what are the easiest, quickest and most rewarding flowers to make from the perspective of a 5 to 6 year old so that I can put together a kit of loom and materials for Christmas.

Flower loom flowers

My first 5 efforts are shown left to right.

Number 1: small yellow flower made on the inner ring of pegs, using three rounds of variegated anchor cotton. Lessons learnt: the middle needs to be stitched more solidly, and more than three rounds are necessary for a thread of this thin-ness

Number 2: metallic white flower made as a double flower with three rounds of cotton on all three sets of pegs.  Lessons learnt: after hanging it from a branch to see if it would work as a Christmas decoration, it lost all shape and form. Also, probably best to stick to the small pegs for thinner threads

Number 3: five rounds of coral organic cotton, with a middle stitched in yellow, both of which were bought especially with little girls and flowers in mind. This constituted my first success and dictates the first set of yarns that will be wound up into flower sized lengths to accompany the loom for Christmas

Number 4: ribbon flower wound on the large set of pegs - about 4 metres of thin ribbon wound 3 times making a nice weight ribbon flower, then the middle stitched using the third cotton I bought yesterday (a pale pink). I've already wound up the other 2 sets of ribbon I had and put them with the loom as I think the little girl in question will like this one a lot.

Number 5: lime green rosette style flower. It didn't start off being a rosette, it just inadvertantly became one during the making process. It wasn't a long length of ribbon, and it was thicker than Number 4 which made it a lot harder to work with (as it kept trying to jump off the pegs) and meant it was a single round of the small pegs and then finished off with one of the yarns I had delivered a couple of weeks ago

Now all that remains is to think of reasons to make them - I have a scarf that could use a bit of brightening up, so I see some flowers like Number 3 being made to adorn that. I think Numbers 1 and 5 have potential on greeting cards or as gift tags, and of course I need to put some into the Christmas present for the little girl in question as inspiration.