Soprarizzo velvet in Venice

If you haven’t yet seen it, I have an article in the current issue of Inspirations magazine (Issue 83) entitled “The Velvet Weavers of Venice”. Quite a number of people have told me they really enjoyed the article.

As a follow up, for those who would like to see a bit more, I’ve just found a blog post about the velvet they weave, called soprarizzo velvet, on Bevilacqua’s webpage. There is also a video, posted below, but which also can be found at the link provided, for those who read this blog as an email.

http://www.luigi-bevilacqua.com/news/2014/02/velvet-behind-scenes/?lang=en

The video is in Italian, which I don’t understand and maybe you don’t either. However, they do show aspects of the weaving process and for visuals, we don’t need to understand the language! The video may help you to make sense of the process that is used to weave soprarizzo velvet.

The long gold rods at the front edge of the weaving, underneath the red silk threads create the patterns of cut and uncut pile in the fabric. Near the end of the video (2:40) the weaver picks up the blue knife and cuts along a groove in one of the rods. This creates the cut pile for that row. She then slides out another rod towards the left. This is for the row of uncut pile.

At 1:24 in the video, they look up above the loom, and you can see all the punched cards that tell the loom the pattern to use.

At 1:56, at the left of the screen, you can see the spools of silk thread sitting under the loom. This is the silk which forms the cut and uncut pile.

The article that I wrote was a spur of the moment thing which only suggested itself when we arrived in Venice. Before our arrival, I knew nothing about soprarizzo velvet at all. I was doing an internet search for likely places to find fabric in Venice, when it came up. I decided it was something I wanted to learn more about, and something that the readers of Inspirations would probably be interested in as well. From there followed a flurry of emails to Inspirations (“would you be interested in an article on…?”) and to the business that makes the velvet, Luigi Bevilacqua. Fortunately, there were a few staff members who spoke/wrote English, and I was able to arrange a visit to them during our short stay in Venice. Sometimes things are very serendipitous!