One of the best known and most successful community projects was set up during the 1950s in Egypt by the architect Ramses Wissa Wassef. He opened a workshop in the village of Harrania specially to teach peasant girls and boys aged eight years and over to weave tapestry.
According to Wassef, the children were not selected because they possessed any particular talent. He hoped simply, left to themselves, they would all be able to produce tapestries representing different aspects of their daily lives.
And that is what they did.
There was no supervision, there were no cartoons from which to work, the children were simply left to improvise. They wove camels, goats, elephants and mice, and people in their daily surroundings. The weavings were invariably meticulous and detailed.
The studio at Harrania is still in existence, now with a second generation of weavers. The work has been exhibited all over the world. They are highly prized as collector’s items because their freshness and childlike simplicity, technical expertise and the clarity of their depiction of their country, make them unique.
Artists have different formulas for pricing their tapestries. The most exact, worked out by an accountant that I found in “Weaving for Worship”, by Joyce Harter and Lucy Brusic was as follows: Take the material cost and the hourly cost of the labor and add them together. Multiply the resulting sum by 20% to account for overhead. Add these two figures together and multiply the resulting number by 10% to allow for profit. Add the 10% to the first figure to determine cost.
Weaving for hospitals, chapels or other non-denominational settings has to meet some special requirements; the design must be inspirational but not carry the iconography of any specific religious group; ideas such as peace, strength, healing, love and care are popular themes in these settings.
Different techniques work for different types of designs. For example, the technique called vertical slit (where the weft threads meet and separate in opposite directions) is useful for shading, while slit tapestry technique (where weft threads do not share a warp thread as they turn) will give a sharp line of color change. Diagonal slit tapestry (where the slit caused by meeting weft threads is on an angle) is useful for building shapes.
Through a description of a nun’s belongings and equipment from the end of the 15th century we know that a rya, a long-pile knotted rug, was included in the bedclothes. Thus from the beginning it had a purely practical character and was used as a bedcover with the pile side downwards. Even when the rya obtained some degree of 
The Bayeux tapestry, probably made in England around 1070 is considered to be the most distinguished example of preserved textile pictorial art from Norman times.
I design tapestries and hand-weave them on vertical looms in my 