It was a landmark moment when the first of the hand-made rugs, specially created for the palace, arrived from overseas.

After having sent the designs to a specialist company in Lahore many months ago, it was wonderful to see the finished version, which is a masterpiece of craftsmanship. There are even faint echoes of the early 1540s when the palace was being furnished for the first time.

Back then carpets were a great luxury, brought on long slow journeys by land and sea from countries like Turkey – then part of the great Ottoman Empire.Nowadays we still look east to find people with the skills to make carpets of the kind that Mary of Guise and her daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots, would have walked on. Fortunately the transport is a lot quicker and less risky today.

Closer to home we have also had the first glimpse of some of the wonderful workmanship being produced for the palace by some of Scotland’s best embroiderers. It’s beautiful stuff – royal crowns stitched with gold, rampant lions, elegant unicorns and one of the most ferocious looking eagles you can imagine. They are the components for the first of two cloths of estate, bearing the heraldry of James V’s young widow, Mary of Guise, that will hang in the queen’s apartments.

The embroidery team is headed by renowned textile artist Professor Malcolm Lochhead, of Glasgow Caledonian University, and includes three ladies he says are among the most talented in Scotland. The work uses many of the same techniques and materials as in the 16th-century – for example stitching with thin gold wire rather than modern acrylic threads.