Custom tapestries are specific designs hand-woven for a special occasion or situation.  The advantages, of course, are their uniqueness and their ability to resolve precise and demanding design requirements. Over the years, Heirloom Tapestries has woven hundreds of custom designs for homes, churches, hotels, restaurants and wineries. We can weave your design or we can research and design a tapestry whose subject, colors and size are exactly what you need.

Why Hand Woven Tapestries are the Best

Hand woven reproduction tapestries are, as the name suggests, woven on looms by hand in the centuries old traditional way, meticulously weaving one thread at a time. These hand woven tapestry wall hangings are usually 100% New Zealand wool or wool and silk, have very fine details with a dense or extra fine weave. Their price is dictated by how much time, skill and materials are involved.  Many classic designs are available today.

Jacquard Woven Tapestries

Jacquard woven tapestries are woven on old looms which use a semi-mechanical process invented by one Joseph Jacquard in 1805. The process uses perforated cards similar to the old IBM computer data entry punch cards. They feed the appropriate colored weft threads (the threads that run horizontally creating the design) to the shuttle, thereby considerably increasing the weaver's speed of production. This significantly reduces the cost of production without seriously affecting the quality of the wall art. The Jacquard process revolutionized the weaving industry, allowing many people with good, but not necessarily royal incomes, to purchase their own tapestries.

Wool is premium; it provides rich lushness, texture and tactile qualities along with added life. Cotton has been used since the 19th century; it is less expensive and provides a smooth luster and fidelity of color that compares very favorably to wool. Today's Jacquard woven cotton tapestries cost about 25% less than those woven in wool. Cotton tapestries are often finely detailed and are generally not visually inferior to their wool counterpart. The wool tapestry may perhaps last decades longer, depending on conditions such as light, moisture, etc., but bear in mind that all tapestry textiles fade and degenerate over time. Today's reproduction woven tapestries, whether wool or cotton, use colorfast dyes that under normal conditions will fade only slightly over many generations. The gain-a rich patina-exceeds the loss!

Most wool tapestries have a 70-85% wool content, with the balance in rayon, linen, or silk synthetic for added strength and sheen. One of the qualities of all tapestries is that, as the light changes throughout the day, from sunlight to electric light to candlelight, the tapestry changes, taking on new colors, textures and depth. Wool tapestries soften and diffuse light. With cotton and silk-screened tapestries, the light strikes more flatly and evenly.

Silk-screened or serigraph tapestries are painted images of the original tapestry wall hanging reproduced on irregularly woven wool or linen (which gives the tapestry the authentic look). It is a semi-mechanical process that requires considerable labor, including hand painting to finish the details. Their main quality, as compared to woven tapestries, is their antique, faded appearance, and their availability in large to very large (palace) sizes. They have the 'look' and 'visual' texture of many original tapestries hanging in museums today.