I am wearing green as usual this St. Patrick's Day. I haven't posted for some time because the only travel going on these days is to grocery stores and the odd take away. So you are wondering why I'm posting this, well it hasn't been viewed before today. Angela, Ryan and I traveled through Switzerland in August 2020 for three weeks. We started in Colmar, France, then in Switzerland we went to Lausanne, Lucerne and St. Gallen, with a day trip into Lichtenstein. The museum visit, I enjoyed but, left in Draft position for reasons I don't remember now, so here you go.
The museum's website:
https://www.textilmuseum.ch/textilmuseum/
You may have clicked through Ryan and Angela's pictures, the www.jetsliketaxis.com link on the previous post, this was not in it. Ryan specifically wanted to show Angela the Alps so they took a day trip from St. Gallen to go into the mountains, I stayed in town and visited the Textile Museum.
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| The front entrance of the museum, beautiful sculpture! |
The museum shows items of history going back to the middle ages with machinery brought in for embroidery in the mid-18th century. It explains the roles of various workers: designers, inventors, entrepreneurs, contractors.
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| Hand tooled lace |
It also outlines the textile industry in Eastern Switzerland eras:
The linen era - white gold 1200 - 1700, called white gold because products were traded internationally bringing merchants wealth.
Cotton - the beginning of industrialization 1750 - 1850, the cotton from Africa was replacing linen or being blended and spinning machines were invented to speed up the process.
The age of embroidery - the golden years 1850 - 1914 the techniques of machine produced embroidery were invented in St. Gallen which made it and the products internationally famous.
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| Volunteer working the embroidery machine |
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| The other side of the machine. |
The embroidery crisis 1914 - 1950 both world wars, the depression caused the industry to decline dramatically. The Swiss government paid premiums to scrap the machines.
Eastern Switzerland's textile industry 1945 to the present day after the second world war it recovered somewhat but not to the extent it was before 1914. Today the focus is on high-end niche products for haute couture, lingerie, or innovative fabrics for medicine, architecture or automotive.
The current exhibition is Material Matters which showcases the raw form to the completed form of fabric and explores what influence the textiles have on our ecological system. It explains the negative effect "fast fashion" has on the system.
I was fascinated with the whole experience, learned a lot and truly enjoyed my time there. What I hadn't remembered is that I like fabric and was a regular visitor to the Yurts in Madeira Park https://www.fibreworksgallery.com/
St. Gallen for me was unique, here is a link to explain one of the reasons why. https://www.myswitzerland.com/en-ch/experiences/city-lounge-red-square/
We stayed a week in Lausanne, with it's hilliness terrain and Lake Geneva; a week in Lucerne with the river running through and ancient bridges and then St. Gallen with multiple day trips from those three cities. It was an actual "summer vacation" for me, much appreciated and hadn't happened for a while.
Cheers, Bev and the travelling cat Lexi
