Tapisserie to the Petit point

also called Needlepoint.

Needlepoint Tapestry is made using a small stitch called Petit point on a groundwork called canvas. To make these tapestries, one has used often too the cross stitch. One of its current uses in decorative art of furnishing is the seat cover. Since centuries famous artists draw on their paperboards for the men and women's expert hands, peoples who were not less famous, and devoting themselves to this Creative Leisure.
It is certainly the oldest use of the of colored threads in decoration, whether clothing or furnishing. Indeed it were in Solutrean era and human being group, born in south-west of France (22 000 to 17 000 B.C.) that the needle with eye were invented. It is undoubtedly a complex tool since it is conceived by itself answers to several functions: the one to pierce and one other to retain a thread and to allow the crossing of it through a thickness of material.
Of size lesser than the low and hight warp Tapestry loom, the tool used is in this case named standing frame. That small dimenssion facilitates its displacement from a room of an apartment to another and even outside or in travels. This ease of implement is without any doubt at the origin of the success of the Tapestry to the Petit Point, the needlepoint art, across all social class and particularly at the origin of its difusion in the one having free times i.e. the nobility and the upper middle class.

One could say needlepoint tapestry was an intimist art compared to the low or hight warp tapestry which would be more architectural. This is to ignore certain immense works which were carried out using this technique. Without speaking about the tapestry of Bayeux suming up nearly seventy five meters length, which is more related with the embroidery, one can still today admire in Clandon and Parham park in Great Britain the majestic hanging of bed of almost three meters in height. What also to say of these true tapestries still nowadays realized to the Petit point and who also measure off more than three square meters?
Thus works as varied as mural tapestries, bell-pulls, cushions, pelmet etc. seen the day thanks to this individual and unmemorable creative Art. Michelet, a great French writer and historian said in its book the People: I knew several distinguished women who said to not well be able to think, nor to well speak, but at same time being doing needlepoint tapestry.