Conserving Vulture Peak | Episode 7: Removing the Old Restoration

So last time you saw the embroidery, we had it face up. What we've now done is we've cut it off the stretcher, cut through the old restoration fabric around the edge and removed that wooden frame. We've turned it over face down onto this slightly padded board with smooth non-static paper and we're just slowly peeling back the restoration fabric and removing the stitches as we go. So I can show you exactly what we're doing in each section. So I'm starting by just cutting these restoration stitches, the old restoration from the back like this, using tweezers to remove them. This is quite tricky because a lot of the threads are very degraded so they're just breaking off in the tweezers very often. I'm cutting the restoration fabric into strips as I go. So I'm peeling this back to reveal the back of the embroidery and then just removing the restoration stitches as I go. And to make this easier I'll cut off each strip so that it's not getting in the way. This fabric, it has some historical interest so we'll probably just keep a fragment as a record of that original restoration. It's really special to be able to see the back of the embroidery. We wouldn't have had this opportunity unless we had decided to remove the degraded restoration fabric. So it's fantastic to be able to get a better insight into how the embroidery was made, the size of the stitches and most of all the colour of the threads because they're less dirty and less faded on the back so we get a much better sense of how they would have looked originally. So I'm taking the backing off the area that is behind the right hand bodhisattva figure. It's the area of the face so I've got the face and the halo and here there's much less stitching than in some of the other areas but you've got a lot of this dark blue thread that is following the outlines in the embroidery. I'm starting off by just cutting or breaking each of the threads on the back. The thread used in the restoration is actually so degraded that I don't need any force or even scissors at all in order to break it. It's just a light touch and it's just falling apart so it really again reinforces the reason why we need to redo this stitching. So I'm just breaking the stitches in this area and then where I can I'm pulling them out and again you know we're going to keep samples of these threads but we're not going to keep all of them. Now I've sort of cut and removed some of the thread at the back I can just gently peel back small sections of the restoration backing and then I can slip in a piece of melonex film just in between that allows me to cut with confidence to know that I'm just going to cut through the backing fabric and not accidentally cut the object itself. So what's really nice now that we've you know revealed even more of the back of the embroidery so you can really see some of the original colours particularly I like the you know there's this light blue and a light green in the stripes in the halo which from the front is faded and become very dirty almost the same colour on the front but now they're definitely different colours.