This Atlantan Creates on Multiple Looms
Kim Berendt, an accomplished textile weaver, has mastered many handcraft skills.
Chana Shapiro is an educator, writer, editor and illustrator whose work has appeared in journals, newspapers and magazines. She is a regular contributor to the AJT.
Some crafted creations are so carefully planned and display such expertise in their execution that they achieve the status of excellence.
Kim Berendt is a highly skilled weaver whose work easily fits into the excellence category. She has three looms, which allow her to work on multiple projects at the same time. Her floor looms are much larger and more complex than the table looms familiar to many of us, and as she sits at her bench, ready to continue weaving a sizeable work-in-progress, her comfort and well-earned confidence are immediately evident.
Berendt studied anthropology in college. “I majored in cultural anthropology. I didn’t think that I would be an anthropologist. I just thought I had four years to do what I loved.” She became an IT professional who now works remotely for a hospital in Charleston, where she and her family lived before moving to Atlanta. They moved to Atlanta in 2012 when their oldest child was going into sixth grade because they wanted their children to attend Jewish secondary schools. She works with the electronic medical record the hospital uses, designing tools that the clinicians access in ambulatory clinics.
Berendt elucidates, “I’m now the manager of my department. My job involves a lot of troubleshooting and math and so does weaving, so they’re compatible!”
Weaving would not be recommended for anyone who is restless or impatient. It is a labor-intensive, sustained endeavor that finally results in a one-of-a-kind woven textile. Each of Berendt’s textiles is woven following the design plan she maps out first. The project starts with attaching the warp yarn tautly to the loom. The warp is the yarn running lengthwise on the loom. Then the weft yarn is woven crosswise over and under the warp yarn to create the fabric’s structure and texture, ultimately resulting in the intended design. An experienced weaver like Berendt is skilled enough to create complex woven patterns, as well as plaids and striped designs.
In addition to weaving, Berendt excels at a variety of other hand crafts. As a child, she learned these skills from her mother and grandmother who expertly made most of her clothes and taught her needlepoint, embroidery, knitting, and crocheting.
“I learned to sew by hand and by machine. I was sewing by the time I was seven,” she notes. Although she didn’t spend much time on those skills during her high school and college years, her desire to make things with her own hands endured.
When Berendt’s first child was born, she bought a sewing machine. She also bought some yarn and “relearned” knitting to create bespoke items that included her son’s favorite blanket. Berendt knits daily and loves making baby gifts. She regularly presents neighbors’ children with handmade blankets, sweaters and stuffed animals, and she’s pleased when she’s asked to repair a blanket a child has “loved to death.”
Berendt shares this anecdote, “I made a small, knitted chicken for my daughter, before she went to seminary. Her classmates loved it so much they all wanted their own. I knitted 20 chickens while my daughter was home over winter break.”
Possessing quality knitting yarn inspired Berendt to try weaving. Using her first moderately-sized loom convinced her that she loved that craft, and she bought a very large floor loom from a weaver on Craig’s List in 2018. It was 60 inches wide! The loom took up too much space in her weaving area, and she sold it last year. She then purchased smaller looms that are more flexible to use. Multiple looms enable Berendt to weave several pieces at the same time. She sometimes spins her own yarn on her own spinning wheel.
Berendt’s work area contains yarn of every color and texture, scores of intriguing tools, and includes dozens of weaving-related books. The room encourages a feeling of energy and creativity. Berendt says, “My husband and family are very supportive and have graciously given me the space I need for everything, I have my yarn sorted by thread size and fiber type, mostly cotton or silk, and I also can weave with my stash of knitting yarn, so there are a lot of possibilities.“
Concerning future projects, she answers, “I love learning new things and acquiring new skills. I’ve almost never met a craft I didn’t want to try.”
For Berendt, weaving is meditative, relaxing, and also challenging. She considers it a hobby and adds, “I’d love to explore some other types of looms: there are so many ways to weave, so many kinds of looms, yarn, types of weaving structures. The possibilities are endless.”
She belongs to Facebook weaving groups and says other weavers inspire her. She does not sell her work; however, she has held weaving demonstrations for interested groups. Watching the weaving process in person was surely instructive, fascinating, and definitely a novel experience.
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