Gobelins

While touring art galleries and palaces in France, we've seen a lot of tapestries. It seems that most (if not all) of them come from Gobelins manufactory. We toured the sweat shop ateliers today and watched some of the painstaking and very, very manual work that goes into their tapestries and carpets.

Transferring patterns onto the strings is done by hand, using a wooden stylus dipped in paint, and twisting each string as the paint is applied so that each outline is visible on each string.


Therapy time. Shuttle under a few threads. Pack it down. Check against the pattern. This beats basket weaving. For carpets all the loops are trimmed with scissors, like hairdressing--snip, snip, snip, check for evenness, snip again.


Needless to say, the results are stunning. This one by Guðmundur Guðmundsson was on display in their gallery.