Machine-made tapestries should not be seen as being in competition with hand-woven tapestries. On the contrary, they should complement the work of the hand weavers.
Good machine-made examples constitute a step forward for woven images and cannot be ignored in modern interior design. No hand weaver, for example, could produce enough fabric to cover the seats in a theatre, nor would that be desirable; no machine can produce a work of art, with the subtleties and individualities that hand weaver can provide.
Most weavers prefer to design and weave on commission and it is in the commissioning that the real excitement lies. A good deal of bespoke weaving is for large architectural spaces, often planned by a team made up of the architect or art consultant and the tapestry artist. Commissioned work does not have to be for large corporate or civic buildings however, and commissioning for a specific area in the home can be particularly satisfying.
Today’s 
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.
I design tapestries and hand-weave them on vertical looms in my 