A Postcard a Day - Monday 16 Nov 2015 - Map and tapestry

Good morning! Good Monday!

Yesterday I showed a church, today it is a map. In fact it is a map of Portugal:

 It was sent to me by Raquel, who is Portughese but lives in Belgium. I have been to Portugal a few times but only to the Algarve area which is in the south. I love the white wine they call 'vinho verde'. We are planning a road trip in the spring to stock up on wine.

The stamps are impressive:

I did some research on the top one as I like art and that looked like a sculpture. In fact it's a tapestry. In Portalegre (a town on the map more or less in the  middle of the red bit) they make tapestries from original artwork by Portuguese (or foreign) artists. 

The original is enlarged to the desired size onto a squared paper where each square represents a stitch – called the weaving drawing. The designer then works on the drawing, by comparison with the original, paying attention to the shapes, borders between colours and every detail that will have to be translated into the weaving. The colours have also to be selected, which involves matching the original with the colours (over 7,000 are available) in the manufacture’s wool palette. 

The decorative weft consists of eight threads, which means that different coloured yarns can be mixed in the same weft, producing very rich chromatic effects, enabling depth, transparency and surface superposition effects with virtually an infinity of colours.

Portalegre tapestries are woven by hand on vertical looms. They are woven from the base up and from the reverse side. The decorative weft wraps around the warp, crating a density of 2,500 stiches/dm2.

The tapestry grows horizontally. After each passage of the decorative weft there is a passage of a fine cotton weft which will be concealed by the thickness of the decorative weft.

The work of art on the stamp is called: 'Finalidade sem fin' and the artist is Cruzeiro Seixas:

You can see his complete work plus a detail on the stamp but here is a larger photo:

And here is a small detail from the tapestry:

Isn't it beautiful! I enjoyed looking into this. And all this just from a stamp! (The info and images are from the Tapecarias Portalegre website).

That's it from me today.

CU tomorrow when I link up with T for Tuesday.

Blessings,

Lisca