Welsh Wool Tapestry Blanket - Blue, orange, green and cream

A vintage 100% woollen blanket made in Wales c1970.  Made to keep you warm.

Our selection of blankets are all vintage and many are antique.  Their good condition is a tribute to the fact that they are made from wool.  Being an old drovers town in a rural area there were several mills in and around the Llandovery area ; to which the local farmer would take his shorn wool to have a blanket made.  In fact there were many such little woollen mills that have now long since vanished in rural Wales.  In the nineteenth century the woollen industry in Wales was pivotal.  There were over 300 mills operating in Carmarthenshire, Cerdigion and Pembrokeshire alone.  The Georgian buildings in Llandovery were mainly built as a result of the profits from the woollen trade.

Tapestry blankets are probably recognised as the most typically Welsh of all woollen covers.  They are not made from tapestry at all but rather a double ply yarn.  Originally this double cloth was woven for practical hard wearing bedcovers.

Once considered crude and unfashionable the coarse 18^th Century blankets are the ones most sought after today.  Interior decorators love what they refer to as the “gritty” ones, and several of the top home furnishing designers have attempted to copy them.

The earlier most primitive blankets have bold, vertical stripes and were made on a narrow loom.  They consist of two widths joined together down the centre by hand.  Before the turn of the 20^thcentury when the Jacquard loom was invented narrow loom blankets were the norm.  Many of the smaller mills, however, never changed over to the wider double loom and so were still producing narrow loom blankets right up to the 1940s 

[Thanks to Jen Jones Welsh Quilt Centre]