The Lyon silk weavers

At a glance

• Place: Croix-Rousse, Lyon
• Weaver interviewed: Ludovic de La Salle, at the Maison des Canuts
• Speed: 3 to 15 cm a day
• Price of such silks in 1995: 5,000 to 15,000 francs a metre

The silk district

In the nineteenth century the steep streets of the Croix-Rousse resounded with the looms of thousands of canuts. Their tall buildings served as both workshop and home. By the 1990s the looms had fallen silent one after another, and apartments were replacing the old workshops.

Only the hand weavers could reproduce historic silks, which is why national museums and very wealthy clients still called on them.

Weaving a brocade

The weaver sits at his loom on a wooden bench and works on the back of the cloth. He passes his silk shuttles one by one, choosing without hesitation among some twenty close colors, and reproduces the design from memory. On a single brocade he may handle up to thirty boxwood shuttles.

With a sharp movement he pulls the wooden batten to beat the weft tight. Preparing a loom can take more than six weeks, and a single piece more than a year.

From design to cloth

Designs are painted by hand by the designer, then copied at full size on squared paper by the metteur en carte, each square standing for a point of the weave. The liseur transfers this onto Jacquard cards by punching holes.

Until 1725 a draw-boy, the tireur de lacs, pulled the pattern cords by hand. Jacquard mechanisms arrived in 1805; canuts who feared for their jobs broke them, the book says, with their clogs.

Silk itself

Forty days after hatching, the silkworm is stifled with hot air; the cocoon is plunged into water at 90 °C and unwound. One cocoon gives 600 to 1,800 metres of thread, and a kilo of raw silk needs about 4,500 cocoons. More than twenty-five trades once took part in making Lyon silk.