Local Weaver Shares Craft During Winter Term Text and photographs by Susanna Henighan
	Loom Shed owner Charlie Lermond helps Alison Holloway with her rug. Chriss Porterfield takes a break from weaving to look at her progress.		Chriss Porterfield, a junior from Portland, Oregon, wanted an exciting Winter Term project. "I wanted to do something fun and interesting," she says, "not intensive Greek or anything like that." Porterfield's search led her to Charlie Lermond's Loom Shed, a business in downtown Oberlin where Lermond teaches handweaving and sells his own finished pieces. Lermond, a weaver since the early 1950s, moved his business to Oberlin in 1981 and has taught handweaving ever since. Winter Term is a special chance for Lermond to offer a month-long intensive weaving class for students. Porterfield and Alison Holloway, a first-year student from Chester, Connecticut, are spending January learning techniques of handweaving. Lermond also asks the students to help him out around the shop, doing tasks like recording his inventory. However, the students spend most of their 20 hours a week in the studio practicing the craft. Lermond differentiates handweaving from other weaving as nonindustrial. While handweavers might follow a computer-generated pattern, they operate the loom themselves using foot pedals and a tool called a shuttle. Because everything is done by hand, the process is slower and more variable than industrial weaving. Lermond is an experienced handweaving teacher. "I start with the basic stuff to see how much they know," Lermond says. "By the end they will have made a few of their own pieces." About a week into Winter Term the two were working on their first projects. "I just want to make something that looks good," Porterfield said as she added another line of purple yarn to her piece, which she plans to make into a blanket. "It's easier than I thought it would be." Lermond says students often think weaving will be harder than it is. "People look at the finished product and think it must be so hard to make," he says. "But it's like I always say, 'It is all one thread at a time.' " Holloway has been interested in weaving ever since she took an introductory class during high school. This January she wants to refine her skills. "I feel like I've learned a lot already," Holloway says. She adds that the technical aspects of the craft, which had been a challenge before, are starting to make sense.
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