Caring For Your Tapestries

Caring for Your Tapestries

Here’s the situation, you have a centuries old tapestry that have been passed down from generations to generation in your family. It is very old and simply damaging it is not an option. You know you will be haunted if your ancestors found out that the tapestry got ruined under you watch. There are several caring tips for your tapestries that would help you maintain them so you can pass them down to your children as your parents and grand parents did before you.

First things first, tapestries were made to be hanged. So it would be best to remove the tapestries from the storage room and find a wall somewhere where you could place them. So the first caring tip that you should know is how to hang tapestries correctly. Improperly placed tapestries can and will damage them in the long run.

When hanging tapestries, you will have to consider the weight and placing the appropriate support to keep the weigh of the fabric balanced. You can use a rod to hang the tapestries or a backing fabric, both of which are provided in most modern tapestries. However, you might encounter some problems with antique ones that don’t have rod pockets sewn on the fabric. If that is the case, you might have to employ someone to fix or sew the rod pockets for you but it is important to go to persons that deal with old tapestries to avoid further damage on the fabric. Using Velcro has been recommended before but due to the weight of some tapestries, sticking Velcro on the back of the fabric might bring more damage than good.

Also, if you don’t know what you’re doing, stop. Let the experts to those stuff. One of the things that you should not do is to cut the corners. I don’t know what your reasons would be for doing that, but that is something that you should not do especially if the piece of tapestry is a really old and valuable one.

Now back to the hanging, or tapestry hanging rather. You need to consider the climate in your area as well when hanging your tapestries. If you live in a more humid environment, then it would be better to create some space between your fabric and the wall just to avoid molds growing on both the walls and the tapestry.

Cleaning your tapestry comes with the territory of caring for it. The reason why your age old tapestry survived and is hanging on y our wall is due to the fact that your parents and grandparents were very careful with it and used proper cleaning methods. Now, you are quite fortunate today since you have several technological cleaning innovations at your disposal.

For instance, vacuuming the tapestry for dirt is one of the basic regular cleaning that your tapestry needs. By removing the dust on a regular basis, you prevent them from accumulating on the surface. You might have to dust the fabric as well.

That’s at least the way to clean the surface of the fabric. However, when tapestries need some really thorough cleaning you will need to consult the experts. Tapestries are quite sensitive. Sometimes even plain water can proved to be damaging since tapestries are made from different materials including the threads and color dyes used.

Here are just a few caring tips for you tapestries. Hopefully you can make your own last so your little ones can enjoy them in the years to come.