Bayeux Tapestry fun - part one - practice piece

My young grandson Harry and I had been talking about the Bayeux Tapestry  , he is eight years old and very interested .
  I thought it would be fun to stitch a couple of small scenes from it  and let him have a go too .

So into my time machine we climb .  Back through time we fly to the year 1066 !
 The Bayeux Tapestry is NOT a tapestry !
 Back in earlier times , any needlework wall hanging would have been known as a tapestry, even though strictly speaking, a tapestry is fabric picture woven on an upright loom with a picture of the design behind it .
 I once had a go at weaving around a book to make a simple bag . I might do this with the children on another occasion to show the difference between a tapestry and an embroidery .
 The Bayeux Tapestry is actually an embroidery . Embroidered with crewel wool on a tabby weave linen .
 The word crewel comes from the old Anglo-Saxon word cliow or kleow, meaning a loosely twisted woollen yarn thread . The word changed over the years to become crewel .
  So crewel embroidery is surface embroidery using wool . Today it can be bought in several thicknesses or weights .
Tapestry wool is slightly thicker usually for Needlepoint and thinner Crewel wool is for embroidery.
  There are several good makes now that I can recommend Appletons, Renaissance dyeing wool , Gumnuts and Heathways . These are all lovely !
     I,m using Appletons in this project .  Appletons definitely seem to have more colours to choose from ....423 to be precise !
 For those who knit or who do textile art work and for those who like to break the rules and mix it all up , then there are even more specialist wools ,yarns, cotton and silk threads out there .
 We are so lucky to have so much choice in these modern times and lovely craft shops from which to buy our needlework supplies .
    How we take it all for granted these days !
 Back in medieval times the fleece would have been hand spun and then dyed  , with natural dyes made from gathered wild plants such as Indigo , Madder , bark , herbs and berries etc before being wound into skeins . This would be another wonderful thing to have a go at , maybe in the summer .
   The Linen Flax was grown and harvested, retted and scutched . Spun and woven into linen on a loom .  It was expensive then and expensive still now !

 We began looking at pictures of the Bayeux Tapestry , both on-line and in books from the library .
 We thought about choosing a nice bit of it to do .... except that , there aren't any "nice" bits  in it !
  This is the true story of a terrible and bloody battle ! The Duke of Normandy William and King Harold defending and fighting for the Crown of England .
It is an incredible embroidered documentation of what happened leading up to the battle .
 It is thought that Bishop Odo ordered the tapestry to be made not long after the event . That nuns in Canterbury embroidered it . It is thought that it was designed and drawn by someone who may have been there and witnessed the battle or things that were happening around the event .
 There is so much to see and learn of early medieval life in the tapestry . The clothes that they wore , the tools that they used in ship building and cooking , their beliefs in God and signs in the stars , Halley's comet .
 The Bayeux Tapestry will be coming over to England in 2022 it has been announced . It could be the British Museum or the V&A , they haven't decided this yet .

 All fired up and excited , I grabbed a couple of pieces of old cotton sheet  and began doodling some of the pictures from my books . I think I,m doing them quite a bit bigger than on the actual Bayeux Tapestry .
  I,m drawing them freehand with a pencil , so they might not be all that accurate , although I,m doing as best as I can !
 I thought it would be better to practice on cheap cotton or calico rather than ruin expensive linen .

 I matched up the colours as best as I could . There are a lot more subtle shades within  the tapestry . The closer I look  the more I see . There are more recent repair jobs that have been done on it here and there , not always too well done , in my opinion . I,ll show you why later on .

It will be easier to stitch on linen . My needle does not go through this tightly woven cotton very easily . Need to change my needle but too excited to stop right now .

                                         The "nice" bit we chose .
     So I have begun , at almost the end of the story actually .
" Hic Harold Rex interfectus est " which means  Here Harold King killed is .. or as we would say  " Here King Harold is killed "

               I feel myself getting more and more drawn in .......