If you’ve spent any time at all with children or young people in the last few months you’ll be aware of the mega craze that is Loom Bands – tiny elastic bands that can be woven to create rubber friendship bracelets in lots of colours. One person even made a whole dress and it attracted huge bids on Ebay!

Not one to miss a craze, I went and bought myself a loom and when I was purchasing it I saw a bag of bands that were black and white and I immediately thought it would be fun to try and make a dog collar out of them. My original plan was just to see if I could do it but now I think I might well wear this unusual dog collar when I start doing assemblies in the local schools! (Although, by September, this craze may have been surpassed by another!)

It took quite a bit of trial and error but I attached two looms together to make one long one like this:

This is the brand of loom I bought – it’s an extendible one (which I bought for £2.99 from Pound Local on Newbottle Street in Houghton le Spring – if any locals are interested!) so I knew I could fit two together:

Then I followed the instructions in this YouTube video simply using black bands up to the middle of the long loom (for 10 pegs) and then white for about five pegs, then black for the rest. This meant it was quite fiddly as because they were all the same colour it was quite hard to see if I’d hooked the correct band – it took 3 goes before I managed it properly.

TIP: do the hooking all along one line at at time rather than in threes across the loom – I did this at first but you inevitably miss one or two and the whole thing unravels really annoyingly when you come to take it off the loom!

Here’s the finished article: