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The sampler was sent to the Textile Conservation Centre at Hampton Court Palace to be cleaned and conserved; the work on its restoration was done by Tarja Bennett. Finally, it was taken into Newbury to be framed in a style as close as possible to the original.
The embroidery is worked was cross stitch on a plain weave wool? ground fabric. The silk? embroidery threads are predominantly green and brown. The full loom width of the wool was used and each side features a selvedge of two parallel blue lines placed 6mm apart. The top and bottom edges were turned under and secured with a running stitch.
The sampler was mounted on to card and had a layer of undyed linen? to separate the textile from the board. The two textile elements were joined at the top and left side edges with large whip stitches. They were turned to the reverse of the mount and held in position with lengths of thread which formed a grid across the card. Each thread was tightly over-stitched into the fabric layers to enable the yarn to be tensioned.
Dimensions of the sampler were 430mm x 317mm as mounted.
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| The original mounting board | The back of the sampler showing Eliza's knots and tangles! | The sampler after conservation |
Conservation was done at the Textile Conservation Centre at Hampton Court Palace. The sampler was surface cleaned on both sides with a low powered suction to remove loose particles.. Some insect frass on the reverse of the sampler was removed with tweezers.
Tests were carried out on the dyed embroidery threads prior to a possible wet cleaning treatment, but the tests indicated that most of the green and dark brown dyes were fugitive in all wet cleaning solvents, therefore wet cleaning was not carried out.
The sampler was humidified using a cold poultice to relax the fibres at creases and along fold lines. It was given a full stitched support on to a suitably dyed cotton voile with a similar weave structure to the original wool fabric. The stitching was carried out around or over the weak areas in laid couching using silk thread.
The padded board was prepared of CORREX (A polypropylene/polyethylene copolymer), polyester felt and suitably dyed cotton lawn. The colour of the cotton lawn was chosen to fill in the areas of loss within the sampler. The sampler on its support fabric was stitched to this board with slip stitches in polyester SKALA multifiliament thread.
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