Weaving Velvet – Peggy Osterkamp Blog
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Today we visited a velvet workshop and school in Florence. The looms were awesome and too big to grasp for me to photo just yet.

Velvet on Loom-Closeup of Rods

We’ll see more velvet looms as we travel around. Besides seeing velvet being woven on huge Jacquard looms, we saw old examples from their archive–and we got a serious lesson in analyzing and some drafting these complex fabrics.

After the tour, 4 of us will be taking  a 3-day workshop at the school. We’ll punch the cards and weave a variety of velvets ourselves– with very knowledgeable teachers who are English speakers.

I look forward to coming back and digging deeper into learning about how the gorgeous velvets are woven.

They provided each of us with a study guide for the analysis  of 4 different types of velvet.  It was a challenge to wrap my head around their way of drafting besides the complicated weaves. The photo of the study guide gives the official name of this world famous organization.