Italy Textile Tour, weaving at Fondazione Lisio

Founded in 1906 to keep alive the art of hand weaving with fine silk and precious metals, Fondazione Lisio offers classes and courses of study, and also does commissions. We were here to learn about and weave on 100+ year jacquard looms.  I'll talk about two things here; one is what I saw at Lisio, the other what I did at Lisio.

Photos from these five days are here.

The jacquard loom revolutionized the manufacture of complicated woven materials in the first decade of the 1800s; it essentially allows individual threads on a loom to be controlled by holes punched in very large paper cards. Jacquard wasn't the first to think of using cards this way... several prior looms had used cards but failed to automated the process; Jacquard's mechanism allowed for very complex patterns to be woven relatively quickly, and by one person. For more information on the loom, what it did to the weaving industry, and how that led to modern day computers, I'd recommend Jacquard's Web.

???? Yeah, that's what I was thinking...

Our experience with jacquard looms started with a tour of the facility, followed by some textile analysis, discussion of the weave structures we'd be working with, some strategies to design thread tie downs to enhance the look of the fabric, and different ways to tile repeating designs; a lot to cover in less than a day!  Eva, our instructor, spoke near perfect English, and was clearly a master of her craft.  Wow.  I'll admit some of this went right over my head... Then we got to meet the looms, and try a few picks of damask and a few picks of velvet to get a feel for the weaving process and the huge looms.

There was a decision point here... did each of us want to weave the pattern that was already on the machine? Or design our own? I decided I wanted to learn more about the looms, and poke around the facility, and not design my own pattern. The rest of the group ended up designing their own patterns, and I eavesdropped and spied on what they were doing so I would understand the whole process.

Machine to lace the cards together

First they drew their patterns on paper, and input into a computer program. When the pattern was what they wanted, they punched the cards for those patterns, checked the cards, and sent them through a giant sewing machine to stitch them together. I don't have a photo of the card punch! But this is the big sewing machine...

The cards were then loaded on to the loom and tied into a loop, and the weaving commenced. Sounds easy, right? We were working in very fine silk; approximately 200 warp threads per inch; so even tiny designs took 50 or more cards for a two color design (one warp color and one weft color) and double that for one warp color and two weft colors. This process took the group about 3 days to accomplish, with many of them just getting weaving on the last day.

I loved this loom...

Meanwhile, my loom and I were getting to know each other...  I was weaving damask on this loom.  I could easily stand under the light bar on the front.  The two ropes advanced each of  two mechanisms on the top. The smaller back mechanism controlled the 8 shafts on the loom, and  the larger front mechanism read the pattern cards and controlled groups of threads. In this particular configuration the two ropes were attached to  one treadle. I'd treadle to advance the mechanisms, throw the background color, treadle to advance again and throw the pattern color; each row of the fabric was two weft threads.  Make sense?  I was happily weaving along...

Then weird shit happened!! The pattern stopped advancing and all I was getting was plain weave. I continued to weave for about an inch, then waited for Eva, who was helping another student...  While waiting, I closely examined my loom... and sure enough, found what was keeping the cards from advancing. On my loom, the cards cascading down would occasionally jump of the rail, and literally get it's knickers in a bunch, if a loom had knickers. After Eva fixed the problem and then had to resync the two card decks, I kept a careful watch on my machine behavior and either climbed up the ladder to fix the cards when they misbehaved, or stopped until Eva had time to look.

A largeish section of my silk fabric, 

which I am delighted to have woven. 

These machines are tetchy. First, they're old, and were not made to the more exact tolerances that modern machinery is; that and they've been in use for a long time, and their wear profile would understandably make them behave differently. Second, they're made for production use; experienced weavers take a few days to get to know the peculiarities of a machine they're never woven on. Don't treadle hard enough?  Maybe you don't advance to the next card. Let the pedal up too fast? Maybe the hooks that control the threads jump off their rails and you don't get the right pattern. There's a lot of moving parts, and a lot that can go wrong.  So many new things to remember, so much that can go wrong.  I was in heaven! Machines like me!!!

There's photos in my Photos album of what the others wove, including some absolutely grand elephants by Gretchen, and some cut velvet woven by Eileen.  Eva, Sarah, and my co-weavers were concerned that I would regret not designing my own piece, and there was a moment where I wished I'd gone through the entire process including design, and punch cards, and so on. It didn't take me long to realize that what I wanted was to get to know a loom, and that coming up with a design and working under pressure to get it up on the loom would have made me stressed and cranky. I'd love to come back for a week or two and go through the whole process... Maybe at a cooler time of year!

This weaving was hard work; they're standing looms, and require that you stand with one foot on the treadle and one foot not while leaning in to push the beater forward and throwing the shuttle. Oddly enough, it's the standing leg, not the treadling leg that got tired. So I spent some time walking around the rest of the studio.

Setting up a loom for velvet (not the red velvet)

There were machines to wind warps, a two step, two machine process. There were machines to wind pirns, and machines to wind warp bobbins for velvet. There were looms with velvet on them, looms with fancy brocades on them, and a computerized jacquard loom where a student was weaving a lovely picture of Mount Fuji; she's the person who designed the pattern I wove. One of the more interesting projects the Foundation was working on was a commission from a museum in Dresden; they were weaving 100ish metres of plain red velvet and plain cloth of gold for a restoration project; I found a video in German detailing the work. The velvet had to be made the same as the original; so it had a twill ground cloth (instead of plain weave) in a pinky color, instead of red like the warp that was cut. I watched the weaver on one of the velvet looms as she tied on new warp bobbins for the velvet... I think it took her 3 days.  The manual labor boggles the mind, even for someone used to making things that take a lot of labor.

I also wandered the halls looking at framed samples of some of the fabrics, some of which I photographed, others I did not. There's some amazing work there. And a amazing workshop, where one of the weavers gets drafted to fix things.

The rhythm of the day was breakfast, shuttle to Lisio, weave, break for pastry and coffee, weave, break for lunch, weave, break for chocolate and a coffee, weave, back to the hotel, drinks and gelato for dinner.   Add in periodic wanders around the building, and that was pretty much it. At the end of the day, my mind was completely blank, wiped, tired. I ate way too much of the pastries Simon got for us every morning, and the wonderful lunches catered by a small local restaurant. Does it get any better than this?

Towards the end of the week, after class, Eileen and I walked out to Bacci Tessuti to look at fabrics... I found a lovely denim blue wool linen blend... and bought 3 meters of it to make a jacket in my tailoring class this fall. When I showed it to DH, I commented that it would make a lovely summer weight sport coat for him, if he could find a tailor... So now we're looking for a tailor and I need more fabric. This is not a problem that worries me.

On our last night in Florence, after we'd said good-bye to Eva and to Fondazione Lisio, we had dinner at Il Santo Bevitore. I had a delightful fish dish with a fried squash blossom, but the real highlight of the dinner was some amazing hand cut pasta with a light amazing sauce over a wood pigeon ragout. There was just the right amount of sauce to highlight the pasta, cooked to perfection, and the ragu was so tasty...  It was lovely with this Chianti!
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