1804
Year Joseph Marie Jacquard's loom first read a chain of punched cards — one card for every pick.
Atelier de tissage Jacquard · Lyon
Silk, woven
from punched cards.
TRAME is a Jacquard weaving studio in the Croix-Rousse. We turn drawings into cards, and cards into damask, lampas and liseré — commissioned one warp at a time.
The loom in numbers
24,000
Cards laced together to weave the 1839 silk portrait of Jacquard, a picture made only of threads.
2,688
Hooks on our electronic head. Each one lifts a single end of the warp when its card says so.
How a cloth
is made.
// Process
-
01
Mise en carte.
The drawing is squared onto point paper: one square for every crossing of warp and weft, a heavier rule every eight. This moth is 44 ends wide and 36 picks tall.
-
02
Lisage.
Each row of the point paper becomes one card. Where a square is filled a hole is punched, and where there is a hole a hook will lift its thread. The cards are laced into a chain.
-
03
Tissage.
The chain runs over the Jacquard head, one card per pick. The lifted ends open the shed, the shuttle carries the weft across, and the reed beats it into the fell.
-
04
Endroit, envers.
Off the loom, a damask is checked on both faces. Where the front shows satin, the back shows sateen — the same cloth, in negative.
Ada Lovelace
Note A, translator's notes
on Menabrea, 1843
“We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.”
The first programmable machine was a loom. We still run one.
The same care,
every metre.
// Standards
Real silk, reeled.
Organzine warp and tram weft from mulberry silk. One cocoon gives a single unbroken filament, 300 to 900 metres long.
Cards or files.
The card loom reads laced cards; the electronic head reads a file. We cut one draft for both, so a cloth can move between them.
Woven to length.
From a two-metre panel to a forty-metre run. No stock widths to fit into, no colour minimums to reach.
Both faces checked.
Every damask is inspected endroit and envers under raking light before it is cut from the loom.
An archive of cards.
Every chain we cut is numbered, laced and kept. A cloth woven today can be woven again in twenty years.
Mended here.
Old silk re-woven from a surviving fragment: we read its structure thread by thread and cut new cards to match.
Common
questions.
Six to fourteen weeks from an approved draft to finished cloth, depending on length and on whether we cut cards. Drafting itself takes one to three weeks of that.
Two metres. Below that, ask about offcuts of our house cloth, Carte 1804 — every visitor leaves with one.
Yes: a drawing, a photograph, a sentence. We square it onto point paper and send you the draft, and a woven strike-off, before a single card is cut.
Linen and wool wefts on a silk warp, and metal threads for lampas. Always natural fibre, always a silk warp.
On the first Saturday of every month from ten to five, and by appointment for commissions. The looms are loud; the coffee is good.
Start a
commission.
Send a drawing, a word or a room. We read everything.
[email protected]
Replies within two working days.