Silky skills enhance The Willis café (From This is Hampshire)

Silky skills enhance The Willis café

12:30pm Monday 15th March 2010 in

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THE silk-weaving skills of local craftspeople now have pride of place in The Willis Museum’s café.

The Mayor’s Parlour Café in the museum has just taken delivery of a beautiful 20-metre striped drape that was specially woven by Whitchurch Silk Mill.

Sue Tapliss, curator of the museum in Market Place, Basingstoke, said: “I think it makes a very impressive focal point – we’re absolutely delighted with it.

“During our refurbishment, we had around £2,000 to buy something really nice and modern for the café. So in November 2008, we decided to |commission Whitchurch Silk Mill, which is renowned worldwide for its beautiful silk, to make a drape for us. It’s taken quite a while, but we feel it has been worth the wait.”

The length of time it has taken is partly down to a 19th century loom, on which the drape was woven, being painstakingly restored for the project. Stephen Bryer, general manager of Whitchurch Silk Mill, said: “The fabric was produced on an 1850 loom. What was quite nice for us was it was one that hadn’t worked in |living memory and now it’s been restored into a working condition.

“Not all looms are of the same width, so having restored this wider loom with a 19th century mechanism called a dobby is beneficial to us. It allows us to produce more complicated fabrics, like the one for The Willis Museum.

“Like Whitchurch Silk Mill, The Willis Museum is a Georgian building. We worked with Clare Hart, a designer from Hampshire County Council’s architectural department, where we came up with some design options, based on a copy of an 18th century humming bird-patterned wallpaper that the museum has hung in the café.”