Year 4 Visit Kidderminster Carpet Museum

The Year 4 visit to the Kidderminster Carpet museum was an incredible success. The children heard about the lives of children their own ages two hundred years ago. The change in flooring from dirt floors to carpet, and the important role Kidderminster in the process was fascinating. Kidderminster was the capital of the world for carpets! Stourport-on-Severn played an important part with its canal connections to the River Severn. The process from wool to carpet has many stages: shearing the sheep, washing and cleaning the wool, carding, spinning and then dying the wool. The first looms were used at home in the attics of people’s houses. Gradually large ‘sheds’ with hundreds of large looms appeared and the town began to make its presence known in the world. The special minerals in the River Stour enabled the dying process to produce vivid, bright colours. Sometimes the water in the river ran with a variety of different shades, depending on what type of colour was being used to dye the yarn.