The wool maker

At a glance

• Place: Séez, near Bourg-Saint-Maurice
• Family: Arpin, weavers since the 1600s in the Tarentaise
• Fulling machine: built in 1880
• Shrinkage: from 180 to 140 cm wide

Bonneval cloth

Weaving began in the upper Tarentaise in the 1600s. Around 1900, Jean-Baptiste Arpin settled at Séez on the Versoyen torrent, whose water drove the mill. The cloth took its name from a mountain guide of Bonneval-sur-Arc who praised it and sold it through the valleys.

Preparing the wool

Gérard Arpin bought wool directly from farmers after the autumn shearing. It is sorted by hand and washed in large vats, drained overnight and spread to dry in the attic, the galetas, turned now and then with a fork. It is then opened in a beater and teased on the "wolf", among the mill's machines more than a century old.

Fulling

After weaving, the thirty-metre piece is sewn into a loop and goes into the fulling machine of 1880. Passing again and again between its wheels, the cloth shrinks from 180 to 140 centimetres wide and becomes waterproof and very strong. Only experience tells when to stop: "wool is alive." The cloth is then rinsed.

Colors and exchange

Natural colors are white, beige and burel, the brown of monks' habits. Not long before, farmers still exchanged raw fleece for lengths of cloth, clothing or knitting wool.