The Wisbech embroiderer racing to recreate the Bayeux Tapestry

'I hate chain-mail': The woman racing to recreate the Bayeux Tapestry Mia Hansson is in a race against time. Mia Hansson hopes to have her replica of the Bayeux Tapestry finished by October 2027 As the British Museum prepares to put the Bayeux Tapestry on display in London next September, the Cambridgeshire-based artist is furiously working away on her own full-size replica. The original, nearly 1,000 years old and 70m (230ft) in length, tells the story of the 1066 Norman conquest of England and the Battle of Hastings. It is being displayed at the museum as part of a cultural exchange announced in the summer . In Wisbech, Mia, who's 51, has been meticulously sewing her own faithful replica for the last nine and a half years. She says the impending arrival of the real thing has spurred her to stick to her completion deadline of October 2027. "If I finish the following year, I'll be old news," she says. "I want to ride that wave." Mia began her work on an authentic stitch-by-stitch copy of the original 11th Century embroidery in 2016 "because I just wanted something to do and needed a project I couldn't finish in a hurry". Since then, she has been working at a steady rate of 6m (20ft) a year. She wants to finish by 2027, when the tapestry returns home to the newly reopened Bayeux Museum in Normandy. Fittingly, that year is also the 1,000th anniversary of William the Conqueror's birth. "It will be a bit of a push," Mia admits. "When I finish the image I'm working on right at this minute, I will have completed 55m, which means I have 13.7 left to go. Which is proper downhill from now on. "But anything is doable. Who needs sleep?" Mia says she first got a taste for embroidery aged six when her stern Swedish grandmother, Greta, gave her some sewing to do "when I might have been naughty". "When I finished, she turned it over and said, 'This is how I check that you've done it properly' - and that's when I learned that the back needs to be as neat as the front." She adds: "I found out immediately, not only that I enjoyed it, but I was naturally good at it." She is currently working on "the first English shield wall", in which nine soldiers are standing close together with overlapping shields. Mia admits that, for the first time, the enormity of the detailing has caused sleepless nights. "Above the legs there was a sea of heads in helmets, and every one with one arm up, holding some sort of weapon, mainly spears of all different colours," she says. "I thought, 'I don't know how to tackle it - if I do one line wrong or the wrong colour, I'm off.' For the first time in nine and a half years, I thought, 'I can't do it.'" Mia works from a self-imposed "roadmap" and plans her next scene "so I don't...

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