Soane is proud to introduce ‘Mabille’ – its most technically challenging textile design to date. ‘Mabille’s’ jacquard-woven design of flamboyant daisies on a rich blue ground is translated from an unusual Napoleon III-era French carpet in Soane’s textile archive and is named for the famously lavish outdoor balls held in nineteenth century Paris’ Jardin Mabille. It is a bold, playful pattern, and has an exceptionally large vertical repeat measuring more than 3 metres. A highly specialised loom is required to achieve the exact structure and weight this historic design demands.
The challenge for the weavers was fivefold: the extraordinary scale, enormous repeat, quality, number of colours, and the technical design required to retain the atmosphere of the original needlepoint carpet.
Before the fabric could be woven, the loom had to be moved and converted from a ‘single placement’ to a ‘single end selection’ loom – the only one of its kind. Despite having worked with this innovative team of weavers for nearly 20 years, Soane discovered yet another string to their bow! Max, a senior engineer with a decade of experience, spent more than 3 months moving and re-commissioning the loom in readiness – a real feat of engineering.
Sitting more than 3 metres up in the air, the jacquard alone weighs three tonnes. It is so large, in fact, that other machines had to be taken out of commission and moved to allow Max to guide the specialist loom into its new position. With more than 5,000 hooks to re-string and tolerances of only a few millimeters, Max explains that dropping or misplacing a thread could lead to weeks of additional work (or as Max says, “a world of pain!”).
“We were sent this really beautiful needlepoint carpet from Soane,” explains Natalie, a director at the mill. “We would normally start development by looking through projects we’ve done in the past to see if we have any techniques that might be adaptable. But with this design it was a quality that we had to work on from scratch.”
The single end selection loom was vital in allowing weavers to control each individual warp thread, to capture the atmosphere and fine detail of the original needlepoint. “We really had to push the capabilities of the loom. There are over 22,000 picks in the design, so 22,000 individual commands to really bring out the detail in the flowers.”
Typical furnishing fabric repeats may measure anywhere between 60 – 100cm, while historical damasks might measure up to 2m. “To do the design justice we knew we needed to use the full width of a loom,” explains Natalie. “What we really wanted to capture from the original rug was the handmade nature of it and the fact that each element is individual.” The single end selection loom allows for this fine tuning of detail, whilst retaining the large vertical and horizontal repeats.
Every single flower (of which there are 32) was drawn by hand and then re-drawn in a pixelated, grid technique, to speak to the original needlepoint stitching. Natalie explains “In a lot of fabrics we’re trying to get really organic, smooth lines but in ‘Mabille’ we wanted to emphasise the squareness and the stitching.” This took more than 100 hours of design work to achieve.
The fabric then had to be designed across five layers in order to achieve the organic transitions between colours. For this, a special ‘chintzing’ technique was used. Across the five layers, 8 colours are used and blended in different combinations to create 25 tones, which Natalie explains is “a really special thing.” Using too many yarns would be unsustainable and make for an unfeasibly heavy cloth “and it probably wouldn’t weave at all,” she says.
While deceptively simple, the reverse of the cloth reveals this exceptionally clever construction – brightly coloured banding allows the team to select which colours to bring to the fore and which to hide beneath its rich indigo background. On the front, small tack stitches – beautiful dot detailing – partly reveals the construction of the cloth. Like the hand of an artist, this distinctive signature of the making process is integral to the structural stability of the cloth – without which, it would almost certainly collapse.
This five-layered design pushes the loom to the very limits of its tolerances and manufacturing capabilities, but after years of planning and many months of careful orchestration and execution, all obstacles have been overcome and the looms are whirring.
