Perhaps you are aware that my mother is a fiber arts nut, and that, now that she has retired and gotten all of the kids out of the house, she has even more time to indulge. She knits, spins, weaves, dyes, etc. One of the things that she does not do is tapestry, but she wants to (she's taking a course this summer), and so when she discovered last fall that one can visit the Gobelins, and even tour their manufacturing plant, it became the most important thing she could possibly do while in Paris. Of course, once something becomes very very important, something will happen to prevent it from happening, and so we never did make it to the Gobelins last fall.
When Mom decided that she was coming back to Paris this spring, she told me that she simply must go to the Gobelins. The first step was to get tickets. Now, you can visit the galleries at the Gobelins all day long, six days a week. You just need to buy an admission ticket from the front desk. Touring the factory is somewhat more difficult. They run 3 tours a weeks: Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday from 1:00 to 2:30, and space is limited to 25 people. Wednesday is a no school day, so that was out, and the only Thursday that Mom was really going to be here (she flew in and out on Thursdays) was Ascension Day, and so there was no school then either. Then, of course, there was Blaise's schedule to contend with. I was pretty sure that Cherry would not enjoy the tour (and that nobody would particularly enjoy having her on the tour either), and so it would have to be a day when he would be able to spend the afternoon with her. That left May 11 as our only possibility.
After attempting to buy tickets online (I needed either a French credit card (not debit card) or to have the tickets sent to our address in Kansas using our American card), I decided that I was probably stuck going to the store to get the tickets. Fortunately (sort of) advanced ticket sales were done through FNAC (which probably stands for something, though I don't know what), and there was one at the next mall over. So one afternoon, Cherry and I headed over and bought our tickets.
Several weeks later, the date of our tour finally arrived. I reminded Cherry when we dropped her off at preschool that it would be Papa who picked her up, and we set off for Paris after an early lunch. We had been instructed to arrive 15 minutes prior to the tour's starting time, and were then able to spend some time wandering through the current exhibit at the gallery, which consisted primarily of Dutch and Flemish tapestries on loan from the King of Spain's collection. Shortly before our tour we headed out to the entryway, and the tour began.
I can tell you about what I observed on our tour. I cannot, unfortunately, tell you much about what the tour guide said because, naturally, the tour was in French, and my knowledge of crafting terminology in French is somewhat lacking. We started our tour in the weavers chapel, then headed over to the workshops. At one time, most of the weavers (and probably the dyers and spinners as well) who worked at the Gobelins lived on site, in a giant close. We walked past the "apartment" buildings that provided housing, and then up to our first workshop.
Here, the artists were working on tapis, which is translated into English as carpet. That doesn't describe what they were making very well though. These tapis were intended to be used as wall hangings, in the same way as tapestries, and some of them had very intricate designs indeed. They differed from tapestries in that where a tapestry is woven, and therefore largely flat, these had the tufted ends of the yarn providing the surface of the work. We spent some time watching the weavers at work. Tapis making is a painstakingly slow business: examine pattern, select piece of wool, double check pattern, put in a few stitches, check pattern again, repeat. Although the weavers fingers flew while they were putting in the stitches, they spent only about 15% of the time putting in the stitches and the remaining 85% making sure that they were going to be putting in the right stitches. Interestingly, we learned that the weavers are the ones who make the determinations about which colors to using in a piece, and that while the weaving is done primarily in natural light (though not when we visited because it was rainy), the color selection is done in artificial light, to reflect the lighting where the piece will be hung.
Next, we headed back across the close to the tapestry studio, where our guide talked about the work that they do in repairing old or damaged tapestries, and the work they do in duplicating old tapestries. Then, into the workshop we went. We were able to watch several weavers at work, on several different tapestries. They are woven sideways instead of from bottom to top, so that the strongest threads run across the work when it is hung. (Also, so that it is much easier to make vertical lines in the tapestry.) They were working on several more modern pieces, on duplicating an old tapestry from, perhaps, Versailles (she said, but I don't remember), and on a large tapestry to be hung to celebrate the anniversary of the bank of France, whose mate was being woven at Beauvais, another French tapestry workshop.
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