Comments on: Kate Davies visits the Great Tapestry of Scotland

Kate Davies visits the Great Tapestry of Scotland

clavicle — Sat, 12 Jul 2014 14:03:25 -0800

The Great Tapestry of Scotland is an embroidered artwork of 160 panels illustrating the whole history of Scotland in the style of the Bayeux tapestry. Over a thousand stitchers collaborated to make the panels, and the design is the largest of three large-scale embroidery projects by Andrew Crummy. Kate Davies visited the Great Tapestry of Scotland at the Scottish Parliament and took some amazing close-up pictures...

...and blogged them with commentary. Panels 1-23: prehistory, the Ice Age, and several species of native animals grooving with the Picts. Panels 24-59: the Black Death, drovers, the King James Bible, Mary Queen of Scots. Panels 60-92: weaving, spinning, sign language, the birth of modern geology, Adam Smith's invisible hand, a wooden bicycle. Panels 93-123: tartans, paisley, women's suffrage, James Clerk Maxwell's beard. Panels 124-160: Fair Isle knitting, Irn-Bru, Dolly the sheep.

By: poe

poe — Sat, 12 Jul 2014 14:38:26 -0800

After looking over many of the panels, I like the way it acknowledges war and weaponry without focusing excessively on it. Amazing work.

By: ugf

ugf — Sat, 12 Jul 2014 14:39:02 -0800

Kate Davies is great - I check her site every day. When she started posting these, I looked forward to them each morning. I can't imagine the skill needed for some of those stitches and wish I could design and stitch like that. It'd be so much harder to collaborate with someone on a panel. She is a great writer and I've learned so much about Scotland from her, and am inspired with her strength at overcoming her stroke at such a young age.

By: Segundus

Segundus — Sat, 12 Jul 2014 14:46:34 -0800

I know the Bayeux is not, technically, a tapestry, but an embroidery. I think the same is true of this - am I right?

By: Thing

Thing — Sat, 12 Jul 2014 14:52:16 -0800

Panel 148: The rise of the SNP It amused me that Irn Bru and Tunnocks Tea Cakes appeared in this panel as 1970s nationalist icons. I'm no Scottish, but these two things are far more worthy of representing their country than tartan and devilpipes.

By: Sys Rq

Sys Rq — Sat, 12 Jul 2014 14:56:57 -0800

I know the Bayeux is not, technically, a tapestry, but an embroidery. I think the same is true of this - am I right? Yep.

By: clavicle

clavicle — Sat, 12 Jul 2014 14:58:25 -0800

You are correct, Segundus, it is an embroidery! The blog posts for the first two sets of panels address that, and somewhere in there Kate links to this blog post from a tapestry weaver who suggests the distinction is gendered, which I'd never heard before.

By: yoink

yoink — Sat, 12 Jul 2014 15:06:32 -0800

Not the first time a nation's history has been thoroughly embroidered.

By: oneirodynia

oneirodynia — Sat, 12 Jul 2014 15:11:35 -0800

This is amazing. I particularly like how the various textiles have been rendered so perfectly in embroidery: the tartans, the lace, the crewel.

By: MonkeyToes

MonkeyToes — Sat, 12 Jul 2014 17:12:27 -0800

I appreciated this insight:

The story of the people who stitched it is stitched up in this incredible thing, and that is certainly part of what makes it so terrific. So I think it was the tapestry's sheer sense of shared endeavour that killed me most: that this was the best kind of collective history, created collectively. Craft and design have, I think, a unique power to bring people together in the expression and sharing of their creativity and cultural identity. In all honesty, this tapestry is the best example I've ever seen of how this might be so.

Just lovely. Thank you so much for bringing us this good thing.

By: Small Dollar

Small Dollar — Sat, 12 Jul 2014 17:39:29 -0800

This is magnificent and beautiful and moving. Thank you so much for bringing this to my attention, I took a textile art class with a lot of embroidery twice during high school and feel like I should get back into it. I'm fine with calling this a "tapestry", considering the most famous "tapestry" in the Anglosphere is also actually an embroidery. But this is better than the Bayeux, politically speaking, because it's an indigenous expression of a long view of history as opposed to a celebration of conquest and imperialism.

By: PinkMoose

PinkMoose — Sat, 12 Jul 2014 17:49:52 -0800

i am of course moved by the skill of these, but also the inclusion of all kinds of history. the panel about women being burnt, the moral complexity of the mary queen of scots panel, the panel about the founding of the first deaf school, the working class and agricultural history, the complicated implicaitons of the east india company and in scotland in africa, that panel about women getting the vote with perth in the corner) (ALSO THE GIRAFFE IN THE ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANICA PANEL) But where are scottish people of colour?

By: penguin pie

penguin pie — Sat, 12 Jul 2014 18:22:46 -0800

Oh thank you for posting! This had somehow passed me by, but looks like it's on display at the Scottish Parliament right now, so I can go and see it. Yay!

By: superfish

superfish — Sun, 13 Jul 2014 02:41:11 -0800

This is absolutely lovely. Thank you.

By: 43rdAnd9th

43rdAnd9th — Mon, 14 Jul 2014 00:50:01 -0800

By coincidence, I visited the tapestry on Saturday and then read this post on the train on the way back to London. I'm not greatly interested in needlework as a rule, but this is wonderful, skilful in both the storytelling and the execution, and well worth a visit. (Which is more than I can say about the outside of the Scottish Parliament building, which from a design point of view looks a complete dog's dinner to me...)

By: abecedarium radiolarium

abecedarium radiolarium — Tue, 15 Jul 2014 03:28:50 -0800

This is great! Thanks for the post - my train tickets are bought and I'm really looking forward to the visit.