Helen Bagley, age 14, of Middletown, Ohio, for her question:
HOW IS A TAPESTRY MADE?
A tapestry is a picture or an ornamental design made of fabric and woven with yarns of different colors. Often you'll find tapestries hanging as wall displays in churches and museums. They are also sometimes used as draperies and for upholstering furniture.
A craftsman will make a tapestry by a special process of weaving and with an implement called a "broche." All of the work is done by hand. He weaves the design into the fabric itself by winding the "weft" or "woof," which are the horizontal threads, around the "warp," which are the vertical threads.
The craftsman presses the stitches tightly against each other so that the colored woof yarns entirely cover the undyed warp yarns.
Unlike rug weavers, tapestry weavers face the back of the fabric as they work. Weavers follow a pattern called a cartoon, which an artist draws.
Very valuable collections of tapestries are preserved throughout Europe. They are located in churches, museums and palaces in Paris, Rome, Madrid, Munich, Vienna and other great cities. Many tapestries are regarded as masterpieces of art.
Tapestry designs usually picture scenes from history, legend or mythology, events from the Bible, flowers, conventional designs, heraldic devices or coats of arms. The best tapestry designs, the experts say, are flat and decorative. When tapestries copy paintings, they are less successful.
The art of making tapestries dates back to ancient days. It reached its highest perfection in the 1400s at Arras, a city then in Flanders and now in France. So excellent were the tapestries made there, that the name of the city also became the name for the fabric itself.
Antwerp, Brussels, Bruges, Litte, Tournai and Valenciennes also developed as tapestry centers. In France and the Low Countries, the governments control the industry.
In the 1600s, the French kings helped the Gobelin family establish a tapestry factory in their dye works at Paris. The government took complete control of the property in 1662 and Gobelin tapestries became famous.
In South America, the early Indians of Peru produced excellent fabrics in tapestry weave before the Spaniards arrived. The Navajo Indians of the western United States have for many years made rugs in tapestry weave, and they continue to make them today.
Tapestries regained popularity in England in the late 1800s when designs of William Morris, Sir Edward Burne Jones and Walter Crane were used for tapestries. In France in the mid 1900s, such famous artists as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro and Henri Matisse drew cartoons for tapestries.
Among the finest Gothic tapestries of the 1500s is a set of six called "The Lady and the Unicorn." It hangs in the Cluny Museum in Paris. Another set of famous tapestries is "The Hunt of the Unicorn."You'll find this one in the collection of the Cloisters, a museum in New York City.
The Bayeux Tapestry, in Bayeux, France, is really an example of embroidery. It is made up of 1,522 motifs and inscriptions in Latin, worked in red, green, blue and yellow wool on a white canvas foundation. It is 230 feet long and about 20 inches wide.