Caratex Stamps

St Gallen Embroidered Stamp

21 June 2000 - A WORLD FIRST
Switzerland issued a stamp which has been embroidered

The stamp, with a face value CHF 5.00, had it's first public appearance 21 June 2000, the opening day of the National Stamp Exhibition St Gallen. Nobody was allowed to see the world's first embroidered stamp, right to the very last minute. When all's said and done, it's meant to be something exclusive and a philatelic rarity because such stamps cannot, and should not, be produced in endless quantities.

Peter Hostettler, who designed the embroidery stamp took as his first inspiration for the stamp, a length of beautiful needlelace, which probably served as a neck or wrist tie, made around 1700 in Venice. This type of work is called "point de neige" or "punto rosellino" because of the many picots along the curved edging and the tiny roses in the border background.

The second source for the stamp was another length of decorative braid, also worn around the neck by men and women but this time a piece of Valenciennes lace dating from the 18th century. Valenciennes lace, named after the northern French town of the same name, is particularly prized because it has a continuous thread. Thus, the background and the pattern are woven simultaneously with each other. The thread pictures created by the bobbins provided further inspiration for the artist's sketches and drawings.

The third source was a piece of machine made embroidery from the 1930's, so-called combination lace. This technique which was highly popular at the time was mainly used for luxury ladies' underwear. It was produced on a shuttle embroidery machine in a complicated process which combined a machine made piece of Valenciennes bobbin lace as the upper part with a piece of machine produced embroidery as the bottom part.

On the basis of these three sources, the artist produced many hundreds of sketches and many different designs for the stamps. At long last, a convincing solution was found. Handmade samples were made and submitted . Once the approved, the stamp went into production.

In contrast to conventional stamps printed on paper, the design of this stamp is embroidered using a polyester thread on a high-quality, satin-weave polyester base. The embroidery process produces a true three-dimensional stamp.

Bischoff Textil AG, who manufactured the stamp, had the thread for the whole run specially made and dyed in the two tones of blue used for the design. The material made was used exclusively for the manufacture of the stamp.

To produce the stamps the satin was cut into sheets 9.4 m long. Two of the Satin base were mounted on the 10 m wide SAURER Pentamat (2040) embroidery machine. 340 stamps were embroidered across the width of the satin at a speed of over 200 revolutions per minute (the needle moving forwards and then backwards).

The stamps were produced row by row until a total of 20 rows had been embroidered. The light blue background was created first and then a second needle added the dark blue text, the value and the border. A total of 340 needles worked simultaneously across a width of 9.3 m.

Since embroidery machines inevitably 'pull' the base material slightly the latter was stretched taut and the stamps were kept in the correct position with clips.

Once the embroidery was finished all the linking threads were mechanically removed. As in the case of any piece of embroidery, minimal differences occurred owing to the number of different manufacturing processes involved. This is quite common in textile technology and means that each stamp is in fact totally unique. Almost no errors occurred thanks to continuous supervision by Bischoff's staff Unlike normal postage stamps, small differences in appearance among the embroidery stamps cannot be termed faults or give rise to different varieties.

Once this stage was complete, the rows of stamps were checked and the self-adhesive backing was added in a series of processes using a technique developed specially for this stamp. Finally, the individual stamps were electronically cut. Before being packed, the stamps went through yet another quality check to ensure that they corresponded to Swiss Post's requirements. After being counted, they were delivered under seal. The manufacturing process for this superb high-tech product, which represents an innovation worldwide, involves a few further tricks which, for copyright reasons, must remain a secret known only to Bischoff AG in St. Gallen!

This philatelic rarity is available in the Year Set and the Year Album, with a special embroidered label (it is not available separately)

http://www.swisspost.ch/philatelic-shop

This article is based on articles by Renzo Lorenzetti (Swiss Post) and Konrad A Zurbuchen (Bischoff Textil AG, St Gallen) which appeared during 2000 - FOCUS on Stamps (issues 3 & 4), the magazine produced by Swiss Post for collectors.