Finding France

For all that France is a hop and a skip travel destination, it has somehow stayed well beneath my wandering radar.  So with just 21 or so miles of water to plan how to cross, France felt like an achievable option for returning to foreign travel this year.  I will forever recall viewing the Paris skyline on the first morning from the tower of the Sacre Coeur, serenaded by a symphony of midday bells.  It was a giddying experience on lots of levels, least of all because I experience vertigo and I had climbed up a VERY long way!

Known as the 'city of light' for its historical age of  enlightenment, visiting Paris felt meaningful in a year where I have much to learn.  With just a few days to take in a city that realisically demands weeks of exploring, I felt grateful for helpful guidance of places worthy of visiting.  I relished being cocooned in buildings that rarely make a first Paris travel schedule and the church of Saint Severin in the Latin Quarter was one such location.  Even on a low light day, the glorious 19th windows created a colour infusion that soothed and wowed in equal measures.

The world renown artist supply shop, Sennielier, on the nearby the banks of the River Seinne was another haven of colour comfort.  Long revered for its high quality oil pastels used by artists from Picasso onwards, the pops of intense colour against traditional wood cladding made for very sensory browsing.  I was time-travelled back to teenage art shopping as I relished high quality supplies of every persuasion and while my purchases were modest, they would later come to inspire heartfelt textile creations by me and others.

Such beautifully furbished shops were aplenty in Paris and a morning stroll found me standing in 'Dam Boutons' in Montmartre.  Never before had I seen three walls of shop covered from floor to ceiling with button tubes and while my eyes span in all diections, my mind whizzed around forthcoming projects.  As I slowed my senses, I began taking in buttons in every concievable colour, shape and size.  Modern and vintage buttons alike were both catered for and while the latter is always my preferred choice, I was mesmerised by the former all the same.  A modest selection of button purchases understandably took me a fair while to choose, particularly as the owner had a strict shopping method to ensure that the button tubes ended up back in their correct position!

Of course my ultimate preference will always be to be enveloped by textiles and my visit to the Musée de Cluny finally brought me in front of the much researched Lady and the Unicorn tapestries.  These six immense medieval tapestry masterpieces depicting a lady and a unicorn are considered to represent the fives senses - sight smell, taste, hearing and touch.  The sixth tapestry shown here, 'To My Only Desire', is considered to represent the heart and sixth sense - so very fitting for me to sit with and contemplate its meaning a while.

Woven in Flanders around 1500ad in fine silk and wool, the threads were coloured with the best natural dyes available at the time - 'Grand Teints'.  Red from madder roots, blue from woad leaves, yellow from weld leaves and green from combining woad and weld.  While all three dye colours were reasonably lightfast, the weld yellow has the least durability over time and consequently absence of yellow has changed all of the woven green elements shades to blue!

It was to be a fair few months later when I would learn more about the historical blue, that dominated French and European textiles for many centuries.  This delightful shop came onto my radar while Sunday strolling around Toulouse, when I spotted brown ball of dried leaves in the window display.  While I had never seen a woad ball first hand before, it sure did look the business. A speedy Google translation revealed that the French translation for woad is 'pastel', but oh dear me, the door to Maison du Pastel was firmly closed and I peered for a sign to see when it would next be open.  

Thankfully a return visit came to pass and the oceon of natural blue that sat inside was every bit as thrilling as I had expected.  The very friendly owner explained that her business included growing woad locally in some volume and producing a powder pigment from the leaves.  The intensitiy of the pigment was such that it had been used to colour all manner of items I would never have considered possible, in the deepest of blue hues - textiles, wood, toiletries, paint and even sweets!

The long back story of woad growing in Europe was ultimately quashed by imports of indigo from Asia and the Americas.  In some countries woad is considered a noxious weed and it is illegal to sell or buy.  Strangely so to me, as my attempts to grow have so often thrwarted by cabbage white butterflies!  Woad is also often considered a poormans blue to indigo, yet Maison du Pastel is pushing out the boundaries.  It has it challenges all the same and the heat of this year has minmised crops and  retiring skilled workers need to be replaced.

I was greatly blessed that such skilled and dedicated makers found me in France this year,  strangely all without planning and when I least expected.  Feeling disappointed after finding a closed art museum door in the Southern village of Elne, one turned corner later revealed the shop of book makers and restorers - Le Moulin.  

In addition to historical book restoration, Le Moulin creates contemporary books made with the highest quality of materials -  traditional cotton Catalin fabrics woven on old looms, and Washi paper, created by hand with fibres from the inner bark of various Japanese trees.  Reknown for its thinness, pliability and durability, Washi paper is often used in historical book restoration.  To chat with the owners about their heartfelt work made for a most memorable afternoon, that I will long recall as I use one of their books.

My French finds for the year ended in the city of Perpignan located at the foot of the Pyrenees.  A medieval fair filled the streets of the old town on a baking late summer weekend and how wonderful it felt to wander around the stalls of highly skilled heritage craft artisans.  What an impressive spectical they created, dressed in vibrant medieval costumes despite the oppresive heat, and the variety of crafts being demonstrated was quite astounding - wood, metal, glass, paper, natural materials and of course textiles.  Chatting with a lace maker and braid maker was such an unexpected pleasure and revealed yet again that the French create with immense passion and skill.  

To say that my French findings this year are a drop in their creative oceon is a massive understatement.  It is now super clear that France is brimming with highly artisans working across many disciplines and that historical and contemporary textile techniques are very much thriving.  There is without doubt very much more for me to learn in the 'land of the Franks' - which made me smile when I found orginates from the old French and Latin words for 'free' - the most vital and precious ingredient of creativity.