Building the Looms

I came home from San Miguel in July 2025 with a peg loom in my hands and a bigger question in my head: how do you teach people to weave when you only have one loom?

The answer came in August 2025, from the Bisbee Arts Commission.

photo credit: Fernando Serrano

A $500 Community Arts Grant - not a huge number on paper, but it was exactly enough to fabricate our first set of frame looms! I brought the idea to Dale Miller, and together we built twenty-five of them. Simple, humble, sturdy, portable. Small enough to carry across and around the border in the back of a car.

photo credit: Fernando Serrano

These frame looms have become the actual infrastructure of Border Loomers. They've been in the hands of kids at youth workshops, in the hands of college students at Cochise College and passed between artists in conversation with Fronterix Collective collaborating on their Camp Naco Fellowship project . They don't sit in a closet. They move constantly, which is exactly what I wanted for them.

Alongside the frame looms, Border Loomers runs off cardboard looms - recycled cardboard, tape, cotton warp, plastic needles, and wool, plus a handout by Alex Chronowski to walk beginners through their first tapete. Cardboard looms cost next to nothing and they're just as real a loom as anything Dale built! For our youth programming especially, they're often the first loom someone ever touches - low barrier, low stakes, high reward.

photo credit: Fernando Serrano

It's easy to talk about a project's mission in big language - preserving tradition, building bridges, all of that is true. But if you want the real version: Border Loomers started with recycled cardboard, a handful of wooden frames, and a dream, and it hasn't stopped moving since - Bisbee to Douglas to Agua Prieta to Naco, teaching people's hands what their eyes already know: that this is theirs too.

-Emmanuel Fernando Serrano

photo credit: Fernando Serrano