Weaving

Craftsmanship essential for survival

The loom is located in the parlour near the window, where it’s particularly bright. It was central to the survival of many farming families and occupies just as much space as the other furnishings: a dining table, a bed and a tiled stove. In small mountain villages such as Blatten, people wove for long stretches at a time for their own use or for local markets, while iin the Swiss midlands many families worked on behalf of entrepreneurs. They produced plain, undecorated linen or cotton by the metre which could later be embroidered or printed in another place, and were resold either in Switzerland or abroad.

Those who produced for themselves sewed tea towels, bed linen, clothes or articles for daily use, such as storage bags, from the fabrics. In the Valais, where people kept many sheep, warm woollen blankets were also woven.

Woven items from Ballenberg

Regina Thierstein and her team show the old craft with traditional materials. They weave wool, make linen and half linen and process left-over remnants into patchwork rugs – just like in the past when nothing was thrown away, but everything was reused. As a trained fabric designer, Regina Thierstein combines tradition and innovation. In the weaving room in Blatten (1111) not only classic tea towels or linen bread bags can be bought, but also colourful mobile phone protectors, rugs, bags or scarves.

Some of the linen products are made from Ballenberg’s own flax, grown in our fields in spring and processed into fine fibres in autumn during the event "From Flax to Linen". On these weekends you can follow step by step what it takes to make linen fabric yourself. What used to be widespread in the countryside now seems almost exotic: the flax is carded, retted, crushed, swingled, spun and woven. Every job is done by hand using the simplest equipment. There is no need for a socket and all parts of the original product are recycled, there is no "waste".