Royal Paris: what their needlepoint kits are like and how to recognise one

When we talk about French needlepoint kits, SEG de Paris and Margot de Paris nearly always come up. But there is a third house that turns up in many inherited drawers and many searches: Royal Paris. Stitchers rate its canvases among the best printed, which is why "Royal Paris tapestry" is still searched for years after many designs stopped being made.

What sets a Royal Paris canvas apart

Royal Paris prints its designs in full colour on Penelope canvas, the double-thread kind. It is the same base that SEG and Margot use, with a practical advantage: the pair of threads marks every square without counting, and it takes both half cross stitch and full cross-stitch if you want more relief in some areas. Its classic subjects are rural French landscapes, everyday scenes, floral still lifes and reproductions of religious painting, often in large formats of 40, 50 or 60 centimetres.

Complete kits include the canvas, tapestry wool already sorted by colour (Anchor wool in the series we have carried) and the needle. They are worked in half cross stitch, covering the canvas completely.

How to recognise an inherited one

• The brand in the margin: the name Royal Paris is printed on the edge of the canvas, along with the design's reference number.
• The reference: that number is what you need to look up the design, know its size and, if wool is missing, identify the colours. If you don't know how to read it, our free guide to vintage French kits shows you how to decode SEG, Margot and Royal Paris.
• The state of the wool: if the kit has spent years in storage, check the skeins when you open it. Wool can have moths; the printed canvas, on the other hand, lasts for decades.

If you're missing wool or thread

It's the most common issue with an old kit: a colour ran out halfway or a skein arrived damaged. The fix we recommend in the shop is DMC Retors Mat Art. 89, a single-strand matte cotton that covers canvas like wool does and is moth-proof. Choose the closest shade on the chart and stitch the whole area with it, not just a few stitches, so the change doesn't show.

Where to find them today

Royal Paris is still in business, but many of its classic designs are no longer reissued and circulate as final units. In the store we rescue the ones we can find: see the Royal Paris collection, where right now one unit of Baskets of Roses remains, one of their floral still lifes, with canvas, threads and needle. If you're after a specific reference you don't see, write to us: sometimes we can track it down.

And if you're weighing up brands, in why discontinued kits are collector's pieces we explain what makes SEG and Margot, Royal Paris's two cousins, special.