The large circular loom needs to rotate with very little wobble so that the pins are moving in a predictable plane. The speed needs to be slow enough for the thread dispenser to move between pins without collision, but fast enough that it doesn't take forever to get a result. It should look something like this. NOTE: It does not make that noise anymore. It is pretty quiet.

Now I'll tell you how I got there.

The structure -

As you can see, there is a bicycle with half of the back fork triangle thing removed. The wheel still rotates rigidly enough for my purposes while only supported on one side. But I can't use the spoked wheel for the loom because the hub protrudes beyond the rim. Rather, I attached the spokeless loom at a distance of about 6cm. It is attached by eight identical pieces of wood. These are screwed onto the loom through the spoke holes. Matching holes were drilled into the spoked wheel. I spun it by hand and all the pins stayed very nicely in a plane, so I consider myself lucky.

Driving it -

I pulled a really nice DC motor from a printer that has good torque and moderate speed. To get power from the motor to the wheel I cut a thin strip of rubber from the tube(I'm getting a lot from this bicycle). For some reason the strip has a much larger diameter than the wheel?? I then assembled this block of wood with motor, guide rollers and tensioner. This was just a handful of bolts, nuts, spacers, washers and a spring that were laying around the shop. Note the screw and gap that are used to lightly clamp the motor.

When everything is assembled, it looks like this. The block is just held on by cable ties at this point, but I'll need to affix it a bit more securely in the future.