game of thrones tapestry

Hand woven of linen yarn, with cotton and metallic threads used to highlight hand embroidered details, the tapestry is the latest in a series of craft works commissioned by Tourism NI and Tourism Ireland to celebrate Game of Thrones® becoming a part of Northern Ireland’s culture and heritage.

Design

Illustrators at Jelly London produced all of the artwork and design of the tapestry panels. Jelly London is a well-known design house with an international reputation for contemporary graphics.  The designers of the Game of Thrones® tapestry studied the Bayeux tapestry and referenced elements of it in their artwork –including battle scenes, fallen horses, crowns, and shields. 

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Weave

The linen yarn for the tapestry was supplied by local NI firm Fergusons of Banbridge.  Ferguson’s (John England, Banbridge Ltd.) was the principal supplier of fabrics to the Game of Thrones® programme, for costume and set design. 

Working to a loom width of around 59 cm, and with a limited colour palette, specialist weavers at Dash and Miller in Bristol, guided by the artwork, created around 4 metres of cloth per day over a few very intense weeks in late June and early July 2017, and again in 2019, to complete the tapestry project.

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Embroider

A dedicated and talented team of stitchers, drawn from National Museums NI staff and volunteers from local textile guilds, worked together in 2017, and again in 2019, to collectively add over 1,000 hours of hand embroidered highlights to the tapestry.   Production of the first six panels of the tapestry, in 2017, took sixteen weeks in total from design to weave and embroidery.  The embroiderers included a recent graduate in textiles from Ulster University, former workers in the local textile industry, and a graduate from the Royal School of Needlework. 

The hand embroidery on the tapestry is of an artisan style matched to the texture of the woven fabric.  The stitches used in the embroidery are couching, chain stitch, French knots, long and short stitch, satin stitch and stem stitch – all traditional stitches, many of which were used on the Bayeux tapestry.  The threads used are stranded cotton, with metallic embroidery yarns, for selected highlights.

Exhibition

The tapestry is comprised of eight sections, one each depicting a series of the programme. The complete tapestry measures 87 metres in length. The Bayeux Tapestry is around 70 metres long.

In the summer of 2017 the tapestry (series 1 -6) went on exhibition for the first time, at the Ulster Museum, to coincide with the launch of series 7 of the programme.  The exhibition continued into the autumn of 2017, with the addition of a panel depicting scenes from series 7.  Between 2018 and 2022 the tapestry was exhibited a further three times at the Ulster Museum.

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On 12th April 2019 the European premiere of the eighth, and final, series of Game of Thrones® was premiered at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast.  The corresponding tapestry panel was then woven, embroidered, and installed at the Ulster Museum together with the preceding seven panels, to bring the textile to its final 87 metre length.

In September 2019 the Game of Thrones® tapestry travelled to Bayeux where it was on exhibition for four months at the eighteenth century Hotel du Doyen, close to the museum where the Bayuex Tapestry is now on permanent display. The arrival of the ‘Irish cousin’ of the Bayeux tapestry caused much excitement at the time, with over 10,000 exhibition visitors in the first few weeks alone.

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Acquisition

The Game of Thrones® tapestry was acquired by National Museums NI in 2020 as a donation from Tourism Ireland.  It is now part of the permanent collection of National Museums NI.

Having been on display five times since 2017 the tapestry is now having a well-earned rest, with each panel carefully rolled, wrapped, and kept in climate controlled storage conditions behind the scenes at the museum. 

In this way the museum hopes to preserve the tapestry carefully so that, perhaps like the Bayuex tapestry, it can still be enjoyed by visitors in 900 years’ time!