The Wisbech embroiderer racing to recreate the Bayeux Tapestry

Mia Hansson is racing against time.

As the British Museum prepares to display the Bayeux Tapestry in London next September, the Cambridgeshire artist is hard at work on his own full-size replica.

The original, nearly 1,000 years old and 70 m (230 ft) long, tells the story of the Norman conquest of England in 1066 and the Battle of Hastings.

It is exhibited in the museum as part of cultural exchange. announced in the summer.

Mia, 51, of Wisbech, has been meticulously sewing her own faithful replica for the past nine-and-a-half years.

He says the impending arrival of the real thing has encouraged him to stick to his October 2027 completion date.

“If I finish next year, I will be old news,” he says. “I want to ride that wave.”

Mia began working on a unique, one-by-one replica of the original 11th Century embroidery in 2016 “because I just wanted to make something and needed a project that I couldn’t finish in a hurry.”

It has been operating at a steady rate of 6m (20ft) per year ever since.

He wants to finish the work by 2027, when the tapestry returns to the newly opened Bayeux Museum in Normandy.

Fittingly, that year also marks the 1000th anniversary of the birth of William the Conqueror.

“It’s going to be a little challenging,” Mia admits.

“When I finish the image I’m currently working on, I will have completed 55 meters, which means I have 13.7 to go. This is now completely downhill.

“But anything can be done. Who needs sleep?”

Mia says she first gained a taste for embroidery when she was six years old, when her stern Swedish grandmother Greta gave her stitches to do “at a time when I could be naughty”.

“When I finished, he turned it over and said, ‘This is how I check if you’ve done it right.’ That’s when I learned that the back has to be as neat as the front.”

“I quickly learned that not only did I enjoy it, but that I was naturally good at it,” he adds.

He is currently working on the “first British shield wall”, where nine soldiers stand close together with overlapping shields.

For the first time, Mia admits that the magnitude of the details caused sleepless nights.

“There was a sea of ​​helmeted heads on legs, each with one arm up, holding some sort of weapon, mostly spears of different colors,” he says.

“I thought, ‘I don’t know how to handle this; if I get a line wrong or the wrong color, I’m done.’ “For the first time in nine and a half years, I thought, ‘I can’t do this.'”

Mia works from a self-imposed “road map” and ends her next scene “so I don’t have to tie the thread so often”, but on this occasion she reveals that “it was like the map had flown out the window and been eaten by a huge seagull”.

He says: “There’s a hill at the end and there’s at least one tree, and I love trees; they break horses and chains.

“I hate chain mail.”

It is noteworthy that the original tapestry contains only seven colors: light and dark blue, light and dark green, dark turquoise, red and yellow.

Other colors tend to be “repairs added much later, including bright orange and nearly black.”

Mia also identified a seamstress who made permanent mistakes in the original work.

“We invented Mildred, the rebellious 11th-century dressmaker,” he says.

“He single-handedly takes the blame for all the oddities we found. He just didn’t follow any rules.”

He mentions a “drunk bird” and “a random human leg protruding from a wall of horses, looking like it was put backwards… bent like a banana.”

“This is Mildred.”

As a result, Mia sometimes has to use the “crippled” original to maintain originality, admitting: “If my lines are too straight, I have to challenge myself a little bit to make it not look so perfect. I can’t make out most of it.”

Mia has published five tapestry-related coloring books and has now produced a larger book containing 25 full-scale scene renderings for embroidery enthusiasts.

Embroidering the Bayeux Tapestry will be available from June next year. The foreword was written by Jan Messent, a recognized authority on embroidery.

Mia hopes this will be offered for sale at the British Museum, while the original is on display there.

As for the replica, that too could eventually sell for a price tag of £1 million.

“I won’t make any promises to anyone until I finish it, because it should stay mine,” he says.

“Part of me wishes I’d never started. It’s like if you watch a really good movie, you can watch it again, but you’ll never get the experience of watching it the first time.”

Mia says she thinks about life after the tapestry visits England.

“The British Museum will have to specially build a display case, which will cost a lot of money. When they take it down to send it back, they will have an empty display case.

“I will have something that will fit that space perfectly,” he says.

“It won’t be original, but it will still be something pretty spectacular.”