As specialist weavers of historical fabrics, we are frequently asked to recreate old fabrics from the merest fragment. For example, here you can see the only remaining sample of a later 17th century Italian fabric that once adorned a Scottish castle. The process of recreating it began with hand tracing the fragment. However, this sample does not contain a complete pattern repeat, and we therefore had to fill in the gaps based on our knowledge of the period. The next step was to judge the original colours and dye the yarn to match. As you can see here, the only difference between the original and recreated sample is a barely perceptible colour variance to account for fading over the years.