After researching the Jacquard loom for my site assignment I thought I would be bored in the old silk weaving district of Lyon the first couple days of our trip. I was fortunately completely wrong! I knew the general mechanics of how the old looms and the jacquard loom operated, but being able to see it was a better learning experience than I could've expected.
How fortunate we are to be able to see the warp threads lift according to the pattern 'programmed' on the punch cards to allow the weft color to slide between the threads to ultimately make nearly priceless material. To be able to hold material worth more than €20000 per square meter was so cool. This material is quite rare today. There are only a couple old style shops which can produce authentic jacquard material for restorations alone, along with just a couple companies which will take orders to produce materials for restorations or for the very very wealthy. In some ways it is amazing that this art was able to survive and be a remembered art form today.
I too was very glad that the traditional way of handweaving silk has persisted. It prevents the art becoming restricted to a textbook with illustrations. What astounded me is that workers needed to maintain a constant awareness of where they were in the pattern as a mistake could very time consuming and therefore costly. As if this weren't impressive enough they did it 18 hours a day for 6 days a week
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