A SILK WEAVER'S STORY

Eleni Kyriacou
22 hours ago
3 min read

Lyon is renowned for its history regarding textiles and fashion. In the 18th & 19th centuries Lyon was in its golden era as the global silk weaving capital. During this time, the Croix-Rousse district became a centre for silk weavers, known as Canuts, who were central to the city's economy and cultural identity.

The last silk weaving workshop in the Croix-Rousse district of Lyon is the Atelier De Tissage Mattelon, which was founded in the mid-19^th century and remained active until 1996. Today it is open to visitors where Jacques Mattelon, the son of Georges Mattelon, offers personal guided tours throughout the workshop detailing everything about its history, the silk weaving process and so on.

We began on the first floor where the process of the construction of silk was explained. We were told about how the cocoon of a silkworm is made of hundreds of metres of silk fibre thread, but to make a usable single, silk thread to weave silk, many cocoons are needed so that many silk fibres can be intertwined together, hence explaining how laborious the sheer construction of silk thread is.

On this floor we saw the workshop’s oldest wooden looms dating to the late 1800s.

A wooden loom dating from the late 1800s used to weave jacquard silks and a detail of the loom weights

Various jacquard designs

More equipment from the late 1800s including bobbin holders

He showed us one loom where he explained the process of threading it. He explained that perforated glass beads were used to thread each thread of the loom 4 times and that there were 15,000 threads, so there was a manual passing of thread through 60,000 holes. The process inevitably took months.

He also explained that a reel of square, perforated card that was installed above the machine acted as the instruction card for the loom dictating the design it would create. Every single element of this intricate process such as these perforated cards were all created by hand.

Of course, he also explained the designing process itself. He showed us artworks artists would create, using gouache on paper, and how those designs would then get broken down into a pixelated system using graph paper so as to be able to translate the design, by being unit based, into the mechanisms of the loom. Below are two examples of the artwork and then the final silk jacquard textile depicting the original artwork, and also an example of a different artwork at the stage where it is pixelated using graph paper.

He also showed us some of the workshops proudest accomplishments such as a silk commissioned by Dior with a marbled, ripple effect which he said was a novel textile at the time. Below is the loom that was used to weave the silk.

He also showed us an image of his father weaving a silk, of which he showed us the sample. He explained the complicated process of making this textile, as it involved deconstruction and realignment after the floral design had been printed to created this ‘blurry’ offset effect that it has, almost creating something of an optical illusion. He told us that these silks were commissioned by Marie Antoinette to become her curtains, but she was executed before their completion, so they ended up decorating another interior.

We were then taken to the ground floor where he showed us later machines. These were noticeably more metallic and less wooden than the earlier looms. He demonstrated the weaving process for us on one of these machines.