Weaves: Tapestry Brussels & Tapestry Velvet

One of the earliest major improvements in pile-carpet-weaving technology developed by competitive manufacturers throughout the nineteeth century to enchance quality and lower cost utilizing a drum patented by Richard Whytock of Edinburgh in September 1832. Whytock invented a mechanism to improve significantly on the production of Brussels and Wilton. The new carpeting became known as Tapestry, or Tapestry Brussels, and Tapestry Velvet (the cut-pile variant related to Wilton), making an unlimited number of colors possible, instead of the restricted number of five or six (plus a few "planted" colors) in five- or six-frame Brussels and Wilton. His carpeting was also more economical because it eliminated the waste of four-fifths (or five-sixths) of the pile wool hidden in Brussels and Wilton below the surface when unndeed for the design. The method of weaving Tapestry carpets was basically the same as the Brussels and Wilton, with looped pile, either uncut or cut. The major difference was that in Tapestry carpets the design was printed on the pattern (supplementary) warp threads, before they were attached to the loom. Thus only one set of pile warps (no five or six) was necessary, and an infinite number of colors was possible.

Whytock's invention was the development of the drum used in printing the pile warp yarns. The process was a refinement of a method for producing figured velvet devised in the 1780s by a French weaver, Gaspard Gregoire (and this brother, Paul, an artist), by painting a picture on the warps before they were attached to the loom. In what was called Velours Gregoire only small pieces could be made, and the warps were laboriously block printed by hand. Whytock's invention of the large drum greatly speeded up the warp-printing process and made possible the production of greater quanities of strip carpeting in this technique. By 1843 Whytock had been unable to produce enough carpeting to make a commercial success of his invention, and in 1846 he sold the patent rights to John Crossley and Sons, who granted licenses to other Britsh manufacturers. Crossley developed a power loom for Tapestry carpets that was patented in late 1850. At the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition, Bigelow displayed Tapestry carpets woven on power looms of his invention, and Crossley presented a number of Tapestry Brussels and Tapestry Velvet carpets, many of which have been preserved in mint condition by the firm and its successors. Instead of being woven in twenty-seven inch strips, they were made on wider looms, and each of the Crossley carpets comprised two vertical sections, each nearly three feet wide.