A primary school teacher has spent six years making a full-size replica of the Bayeux Tapestry, a narrative embroidery of about 70 meters long and 50 centimetres wide that tells the story of the Norman Conquest in 1066, but has only reached the halfway mark on the project.
BBC News reports that Mia Hansson from Wisbech, Cambridgeshire said that copying the mistakes made in the original looks set to ‘turn her hair grey’ after completing 34.2 meters of the artwork, spending top to 10 hours a day on the embroidery project at home.
She said that when viewing the Bayeux Tapestry, you see it as a whole, but she had to dissect ‘every single inch’ of the artwork to be able to recreate it.
“I find all the little details that are wrong that they did wrong from the very start and probably thought ‘doesn’t matter, nobody’s going to notice’,” she said.
“But I did, 960 years later. That hand that’s turned the wrong way around, one bloke, he’s got two right hands, no-one’s going to notice which side his thumb is – I did.”
She said that she is currently working on a piece where the back leg of a horse is ‘just simply wrong’, but she knows she has to copy it as it is, which was ‘doing my head in’.
“But I’m a trained primary school teacher – correcting mistakes is what I do. This is going to turn my hair grey.”
Mia started the replica in 2016, and hoped to have it finished in ten years, but fell behind on her schedule after first buying a puppy then embarking on a home renovation project.
She started her hobby many years ago, making Viking re-enactment clothing in 2001, but when orders dwindled, she looked for a new project to keep her busy and heard about someone else who was making a copy of the Tapestry and thought she would do the same.
Mia said she may sell the replica once it is completed, adding: “It’s not going to go cheap, obviously.”
She will display the unfinished replica tapestry at St Peter’s Church Hall in Wisbech on 12 April.
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