Liberty has put the Bayeux Tapestry on Tana Lawn, and it is not a tapestry
Liberty's design studio worked with the exhibition's curators on the drawing, and it runs across Tana Lawn cotton, silk scarves, ties, handkerchiefs and home pieces, sold in the Liberty stores and at the museum. The thing worth knowing before you sell it: the object is an embroidery, not a weave. Wool thread on nine joined panels of linen, about 68 metres long, about 50 centimetres of worked ground. Ten colours of wool, dyed with woad for blue, madder for the reds and pinks and browns, dyer's rocket for yellow, and overdyeing to get the greens. Stem stitch draws every outline. The flat fills are laid and couched work, three passes of thread, the technique embroiderers now call the Bayeux stitch. UNESCO put it on the Memory of the World Register in 2007 and describes it the same way: an embroidery. Which makes the Liberty version a print of a drawing of a stitch, and the trees dividing its scenes a piece of eleventh-century layout doing a repeat's job.