Thank you ! I bought that tapestry over the net in 2000. When it arrived, I unrolled it on my living room floor. Yikes ! If I had sneezed, those wonderful cockerel faces would have been gone. The silk had turned to frayed pieces as silk will. I turned off the AC to that room, and locked the doors to give myself time to think. How to save it ????? Sometime that night a plan hatched in my sleeping brain.
The upshot was that I spent 3 months on my knees with a watercolor brush aligning those shredded fibers.The gold wrapped background was a mess, as some nut had glued whole areas of loose threads.I won't tell you what I used to adhere those silk fibers, but it was very tedious work. At the time of arrival, the tapestry was 5 feet by 10 feet long. I had to shorten it 6" to salvage some threads.
Finally, after another 3 months of work, I made a stretcher for it, and was able to slide the tapestry on it, and put it on my dining room table. What a relief to my back ! The old Obi border was a total loss, so I used wide gold silk ribbon for the border. My wonderful frame guy found museum acrylic for the frame, and 4 of us got it under cover at last.
I was so thrilled to have saved this piece, as it was not made for export. It is late Edo period, or very early Meiji Japanese. That makes it at least 150-200 years old.The detail is truly amazing.Wonderful padded embroidery, and string technique, used by people who knew and valued chickens. When I later sent photos of it to the sellers, they told me that they had taken it to 3 "restorers" on the West Coast , all of whom had told them it was not salvageable.
Here it is. More detail photos on my page.......
