French history is definitely not my strong suit, so a lot of that part of the visit went straight over my head. But I do enjoy looking at furniture and decorations from different periods, and the château is a great showcase for that. As usual, in between the furniture there was some embroidered upholstery as well as the odd tapestry on the wall. The house is lovingly decorated and a joy to see. After we finished our tour, the rain had stopped and we had the opportunity to take a short walk through the beautiful garden as well.

The visit planned for the afternoon was for the Musée de la Toule de Jouy. On our way there we drove through Versailles, and I had the opportunity to have a look at the famous castle. It is huge, and I’ll save a visit there for another time.

Jouy used to be one of the centres of fabric printing in France, and the museum shows the history of the industry as well as lots of samples of the results. You can take a virtual tour through the permanent exhibition here. I always enjoy the technical displays showing the process of making those printed fabrics. As a special treat, a video shown in a projection room in the basement shows a printer printing multicoloured fabric using the old technology. A special exhibit concentrated on rural motifs that were used on those fabrics. Add a very tempting museum shop, and you have a great outing for any textile lover.

The rows were worked from the left to the right. First up: doing the stitch in its simplest form as shown in the stitch dictionary. I then started to vary the different parameters of the stitching, while still doing a regular feather stitch alternating one stitch to the left and one to the right. Second line I made the stitches as shallow as possible. In the third line, the middle stitches holding down the previous stich are arranged in a vertical line. The fourth one is done the other way round, with the verticals on the outside. This is the variant known as closed feather stitch. At this point I didn’t know what else to do, so got out a piece of paper and started doodling:

I first recreated the ones I had already stitched and then started to try to figure out what else I could change while still doing feather stitch. I tried to rotate the “cups” outwards (line 5) and inwards (lines 7 and 8) but was unconvinced of the effect. Line 6 is a very narrow stitch that could be useful in some projects. Lines 9 and 10 make the height of the two legs of the stitch different: in line 9, the outer line is much shorter than the inner one, making the stitch spaced out very much, and in line 10, it’s the other way round, making for a pretty dense stitch. It’s those two I choose to try out on the sampler as well, and I’m happy with the result. The doodle in the second line plays with yet another idea: leaving the vertical lines delimiting the stich straight, but vary the position of the middle lines. I haven’t tried to work this, and it would probably need drawing the intended lines on the fabric first, but I can imagine some nice effects using this.

I’ve got many more ideas to try out, but even this small an area takes a surprising amount of time to stitch. I’m pretty sure I’ve spent more than an hour on this little bit of stitching. From the little bit I did manage to get done, I like the sine-curve-like line in red, and the double wheel with the spokes once on the outside and once on the inside. This kind of stitch would profit from being worked more regularly, though, making sure the stitches are arranged in concentric circles.

The museum is fittingly located at the Hôtel de Cluny, a building with Roman and mediaeval roots. The items on display show the whole range of mediaeval ornaments. Right at the beginning of the tour through the museum there was a pleasant surprise: a special exhibition showing rare fragments of coptic textiles. After thoroughly exploring the many rooms of the ground floor I ventured upstairs and found the tapestries I was looking for. They have a darkened room just for themselves with lots of space. This makes for ideal viewing conditions, since you can look at the tapestries from different distances easily, and wander from one to the next comparing the motifs and admiring the craftsmanship involved. I always marvel at the huge amount of work that must have gone into those tapestries. You can click on the images in the website I linked to see some information and a few more pictures of each tapestry, but as always, images can’t replace seeing the real thing. The museum has done a brillant job of presenting the tapestries so they can be enjoyed thoroughly. All in all, definitely worth a recommendation.

Finding other places worth visiting was a bit more difficult. There is a fashion museum at the Palais Galliera, but it was closed last summer and according to the website will remain closed till spring 2013. So no success there. The next option according to my travel guide was the Musée de la Mode et du Textiles, situated in a wing of the Louvre. It took me a while to realize that this museum is actually connected with the museum Les Arts Decoratifs, so one ticket will get you entry to both. Since I was interested in both museums, no problem there.  I got myself a ticket and went looking for the textile part of the offerings. What I found was a great gallery of jewellery, and a special exhibition of a modern designer who works on the borders between fashion and art. While there were some interesting things to see there, it was not that much to my taste. I then continued to explore the rest of the museum, which was great. The permanent exhibition of the museum shows a chronological history of the decorative arts from the middle ages to the present. Furniture, porcelain, textiles and lots more all shown within their historical context. So I spent a very pleasant couple of hours taking a stroll through history. Back outside I had my lunch sitting under a tree in the Tuileries, and had a very nice view back to the museum I just exited:

After a leisurely break in the park I had enough energy for another big museum, and I chose to visit the Musée d’Orsay. Lots of famous paintings and sculptures, and of course the marvellous architecture of a train station turned museum. After that, I needed another walk and took the subway over to Champs de Mars, walking through the park towards the Eiffel tower. With too many people around and a thunderstorm approaching, I just walked through the base taking some pictures and then headed back to my lodgings. I had seen quite enough of the busy city for the day so I was grateful when my hostess, a fellow textile enthusiast, offered to show me around a few interesting places outside Paris the following day. But that’s for the next post.

So, I grabbed a piece of green linen I’ve had lying around for a few years, set a long strip of it up in the smaller one of my Millenium frames (picture with other project mounted in this post), and got to work.

The challenge for this week is Fly Stitch. Here’s the result of an hour’s worth of doodling:

In the upper row I just tried out the mechanics of the stitch. In the second row I tried how the stitch looks in different sizes. The pink thread as well as the green used later is three strands of embroidery cotton. I worked the green stalks next. In the left one the stitches are so close together that they almost competely cover the background. This could be useful in some situations. I deliberately left a bit more space in the right stalk. Using a rosé/yellow variegated No. 8 perle cotton, I then tried to stitch some flowers. The round one reminds me of a dandelion clock. With multiple layers and long tying stitches I could easily imagine stitching a dandelion clock completely in fly stitch. I tried a bit of stitching fly stitches in multiple layers in the yellow flower to the right. This would also work well for tree foliage or shrubbery in a landscape embroidery. Last, I tried a little geometric pattern in the pink thread again. The fly stitches here are mostly assymetric, with the tie stitch starting directly below the start of the loop instead of the middle between the two endpoints.

All in all, I spent a fun hour doing something I usually don’t make the time for. I’m already waiting for next week’s stitch!

So I went ahead and turned this into a piecing pattern à la Ruth B. McDowell. This is a copy of the paper pattern traced from the photograph, coloured in for easier reference when assembling the quilt.

You can see that I extended the piecing lines of the flowers into the background in order to prevent too many awkward seams. One thing I didn’t do is to make sure I have one line go through the entire pattern, making it possible to sew two halves of the quilt and then close one central seam last. If I was making this pattern again, that’s definitely something I would adjust, since it would be quite easy to line up the seam that goes straight through the big flower with the seam that attaches the right part of the bud. I’ve added a blue line to the drawing to show the minimal change that would be needed to make life that much easier for piecing:

But well, since I am stubborn and realized my mistake too late, I went ahead and made up my quilt using the original drawing enlarged to the right size and transferred to freezer paper.

The challenge fabric is the one I used for the big flower. I didn’t have enough of it to use it for all the flowers, so I was forced to use a different fabric for the buds. Turns out that was a good thing, so I have some contrast in the colour of the flowers! I also challenged myself to make this quilt using only fabrics from my stash that currently threatens to spill out of its hiding place, and ended up with a very busy background. Seems I have a love for busy and colourful fabric, since I didn’t have anything a bit more subdued in my collection. I have since then made a conscious effort to add a few lighter and neutral fabrics suitable for backgrounds and the like to my stash, since I’m sure that won’t be the last nature-inspired quilt I have made.

The view from outside already suggests the content: an old factory building was enlarged with a modern part sporting an undulating glass front—history and present combined into one attractive package. Looking closer, that glass front is decorated with punch card patterns!

Inside, there’s everything and more than expected. The permanent exhibition starts with a room displaying old laces. The room is pretty dark to protect the fragile textiles, and only gets lit a bit more when somebody enters. The laces are very thoughtfully presented—a whole history of hand-made laces in one room. Marvelous! Even though I’ve seen handmade laces in quite a few different museums by now, having all the different kinds in one room and being able to trace the development of lace following the pieces exhibited is great.

At the end of that room there’s a small hands-on area demonstrating how the different types of laces are made. You can try your hand at bobbin- and needle lace making using the ropes attached there, nothing small and fiddly! Since I already know the principles of making those laces, what was more interesting to me in that area was a presentation of the materials used: they took a small bobbin-lace pattern and made it up in cotton, linen, wool, and silk. Since the four pieces are otherwise identical, you can compare how the properties of the thread influence the final product: the sheen of silk, the crispness of linen, the fuzzyness of wool can easily be seen. It’s no wonder that linen was the traditional material for lace-making, since it brings out the pattern so clearly.

The next room delves into the history of Calais as a center of machine lace making. The impulse and the machines coming over from England, it’s no surprise that this harbour town became a center of the trade. Lots of different exhibits document that part of the town’s history.

Up one floor, there’s four Leavers looms in working order being used to demonstrate. Even though I had seen a working loom in Caudry the day before, it was still fascinating. I could watch those machines for hours. In the next room, the whole process of machine-lace making from design to finishing is shown,  and all the machines needed for this.

Lace is of course used in fashion, and the next room has a selection of lace garments of different times and styles on display. Always fun to look closer at the details.

Just when I thought I was at the end of the exhibition, there’s another room, combining a couple of different purposes: There’s a part of the room showing how modern materials and production technologies have influenced the medium, and there’s space for special exhibitions. When I was there, there was a presentation of objects playing with lace effects using different materials.

What else is there? A library with specialized books, a café, and of course a museum shop with a huge selection of books and presents. I thoroughly enjoyed my visit, and would come again in a heartbeat given the opportunity.

Next stop? Paris!

A little bit of googling later, I knew there was a museum to be visited in Caudry. The Musée de la Dentelle de Caudry is small but definitely worth the visit. The building is a mixture of old and new:

The entrance and museum boutique is in the new glass building, the actual museum space in the old part. The subject of the museum is introduced by a short video, which is available with subtitles in quite a few languages. Afterwards a lace maker shows you around the ground floor, showing the whole process of machine lace-making from start to finish. Although the tour is in French, the guide was doing a lot more showing than telling, so I was able to follow things quite easily despite my mediocre French. I find the complexity of the technology involved breathtaking no matter how often I  see those machines, and seeing one of them work will never lose its fascination to me. The Leavers looms come originally from England. I have been to their birthplace in Nottingham before, but never seen one in action, I needed to come to France for this.  There’s two sets of Jacquard punch cards involved, three different sets of threads, and loads and loads of moving parts.

The first floor had a temporary exhibition of lace in fashion, with lots of lace on display. Of course there also was a current display with information about the lace used for the wedding dress of the year. After all, that’s something to be proud of!

My overall impression? It’s a place definitely worth a visit if you’re interested in the past and present of machine lace making. When walking back to the bus stop afterwards I came across this door with some exquisite metal lace in front:

Lace everywhere!

I started off in the far north, near the Belgian border, visiting the lace museums of Caudry and Calais. Both towns were and are till today centres for machine-made lace, each with a museum to show off their fascinating history. Since it’s impossible to get around Paris when travelling anywhere in France by train, I took that as an excuse to spend a few days there in the middle of the trip. There don’t seem to be that many places specifically for textiles in Paris, but I did find a few interesting things nevertheless. I also had the opportunity to see the Musée de la Toile de Jouy, having a look at the fabric printing industry.

My next stop was Blois in the Loire valley, home of one of the famous castles. From there I took a trip to Chambord. Fascinating architecture as well as quite a few tapestries and embroideries to look at. The next two stops were all about lace again, this time of the handmade kind. The lace museums in Alençon and Argentan both concentrate on the local needlelace tradition, but show much more than that. I had a hard time to get myself out of those museums again!

I finished up my trip with a visit to Bayeux, home of the famous tapestry. Definitely worth it. Since there’s so much to tell about all of these places, I’m planning to make individual posts for each of them. I hope I’ll be finished sometime before Christmas!

The colours drew me in immediately, and one of the small pictures was begging me to make a quilt out of it. So how could I resist? Since those images are tiny, the first thing I did is get out my paints (water-soluble wax pastels actually) and made a bigger version to work out the colours and their placement:

The paper I used is A3 size, and I figured I could just double all the dimensions to get a nice wallhanging about A1 size. Sewing this up was quite a novelty for me. I didn’t do any detailed planning and tried to not use any rulers when cutting the fabric. I just sewed the big striped panels depicting the tulip fields with a tentative plan to join them later. Which I did, in a completely different way than I first imagined. Because I didn’t measure anything exactly, things didn’t fit perfectly on the first try, but after a bit of resewing things worked out. I inserted the dark fabric for the roads by first cutting the striped panel into the right form, then copying that form onto the dark fabric together with some marks for correct fitting. Of course I forgot to take pictures of the process, but here is one where the last corner is still missing:

I didn’t even sew a panel for that last corner, I just continued to add stripes until it was no longer missing. Here’s the finished top, already layered for quilting, viewed from the right direction:

I’m currently in the process of quilting it very simply: Linear lines in the striped panels to reinforce the look of fields seen from above. I’ll report back when it’s all done!

As a preliminary resumè, I did like the free cutting and sewing approach without a detailed plan. I think there will be a repeat performance of that kind of quiltmaking when the right idea comes along. One major source of inspiration for attempting this kind of thing comes from Melody over at Fibermania. I’ve had this blog in my sidebar for quite a while now and love seeing her make her quilts.