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Category: Barging Through France

Tags: travel, holiday, france, episode, television, series, culture, adventure, Croix, Rousse, district, lyon, silk, weaving, looms, Mr, Matalon, Made, de, Fourne

My next exploration of the great city of Lyon was to go to the Croix Rousse district which had made the city rich with its silk weaving. Lyon has a tradition of painting scenes of its everyday life on the barren walls of buildings. The next person that I visted is painted on the wall, Mr. Matalon, who tells of his life as a weaver and the mysteries of the looms. After that I visited the amazing velvet who makes pasmenterie which is the gold braid that is sewn onto officers uniforms and churchmen's robes. She told me that she had been born is this very room on the other side of the loom. When her father had started here there had been no motor and he had to turn a handle all day long without stopping which would have been fatal for the weaving process. She said she was 89 years old one more she said proudly that Mr. Matalon who was 88 years old. She had worked for 20 years for the Russian Orthodox with gold thread but then they tried Japanese plastic gold tread which didn't work when you put it in the washing machine. Now all the thread is plastic with a good coating of gold that doesn't come off. She told me that she had worked for 54 years on these two looms here.

Here is where they make the real gold thread for the burnooses for the Arab sheikhs. Agnes makes her living making silk velvet. She explains the process of making silk velvet and the dangers. She says is working with 8000 threads and is lucky to weave half a yard a day.

Mr. Maire was the next person I visited. He does something called moiré which he explains in depth. I find this section extremely interesting. Apparently the ancient invented this method of patterning silk by strapping stones on the insides of their knees and then pressing their knees together.

In the heart of the Croix Rousse is a restaurant run by Geoff and his wife Janine. Janine, an excellent cook confessed that she had learnt all her cooking from cookery books. Geoff supplies the bonhomie in spades. Before I left I was kidnapped by La Grosse, a very large lady indeed, who told me that she had been a silk weaver for 45 years and that she was going to show me the silk weavers museum whether I liked it or not.

Round the corner Madame Riva shows me how she paints silk. She makes it all look so simple with the just a piece of cotton wool and some dyes. We then go a huge factory for silk scarves which is run Andre Canova. All the colours come from a carousel and prove popular.

The house of Prelle is one of the heavy weights of the silk weaving business. He talks of the dangers of leaving the threads taught over the weekend. He then tells a story of Gloria Vanderbilt who was one of the big spenders of her day and had order material for her newly built ballroom on Rhode Island in 1890. The years had passed and now the owners of the mansion wished to restore the ballroom to its former glory. Prelle had received a tiny sample of the original material from the Metropolitan Museum, New York. Do you know who wove this they wrote? Our archivist said I know this pattern and she produced the original order their sample, the name of the weaver, and even samples of the original threads. They were starting on the new order in a few days. The order was for 100 metres and they thought they would weave half a metre a day.

I thought I had seen just about everything in the silk velvet line but when I go to Tassnerie I realised that I hadn't. There are no modern machines in this workshop. We are weaving 19 metres of special material for Versailles with 27 colours and it will take two years if all goes well. There are 44,000 cards for one repeat of the design. He only manages to weave a few inches every day. This really blew my mind.

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