Bayeux Tapestry Panel: The Duke's Ship Lands at Pevensey

Completed: Summer 2012
Dimensions: 24" x 17"

In the spring of 2011 I visited Bayeux, France, and was able to see the Bayeux Tapestry in person at the Musée de la Tapisserie de Bayeux. I walked the 76-yard length of the nine-hundred-year-old Tapestry (actually an embroidery), listening to an MP3 player telling me the story of William the Conqueror as it unfolded before me.

Section of the actual Bayeux Tapestry

Afterwards, I went to the gift store and looked through all the beautiful embroidery kits they had there, kits that would allow me to replicate panels of the tapestry myself. I was really tempted, but ended up not buying one. They seemed like a lot of money--especially given that I thought I probably would never actually complete it.

Several months later,  I was still thinking about the kits. I finally broke down and bought one online from Bayeux Broderie in December. I was going through a difficult time in my life that winter and into the early spring, and it turned out that working on the embroidery helped me, distracted me, and gave me something to look forward to every day.

My finished panel

The kit I chose was a panel showing William's boat landing at Pevensey on the south shore of England. I particularly liked it because it includes part of the border, which is one of the most entertaining parts of the Tapestry, with many little animals and plants and other extra design elements (some of which were supposedly inserted by the seamstresses as cynical statements about the project they were working on).

Detail of my Bayeux Stitch

The kits provided by Bayeux Broderie are very authentic. They include yarn dyed in colors as similar as possible to the six or so  limited colors actually used in the Tapestry. And they include directions for the only two stitches used throughout the entire Tapestry. One is a vine stitch, used for straight lines and outlines, and the other one is the "Bayeux stitch," used for filling in areas of color.

The Bayeux stitch was a challenge, as it required filling in large sections with long horizontal stitches, and then going over the section with evenly-spaced vertical stitches in the same color to tack down the long horizontal stitches, and then going over the same section again with tiny horizontal stitches to tack down the vertical stitches. It's painstaking, but ends up looking very rich and--I think--appropriately medieval.

The whole thing ended up taking me about nine months to finish, working mostly for a couple hours in the evenings. You can find a link to the kit I used here; Bayeux Broderie has kits for many other sections of the Tapestry, large and small.