It was truly the luck of the draw that brought Bonnijo Chervenock to her pirate flag and allowed her to save a rare piece of maritime history.

As a second-year student at the Textile Conservation Centre in England’s Winchester School of Art, one of the class tests was to pick out an envelope that contained a description of a textile that needed repair. She opened her envelope and happily discovered that her assignment was a crumbling pirate flag that dated to the late 1700s.

“I rather liked pirates, so getting a pirate flag was really cool,” says Chervenock, 26, of Bellingham. “It’s been such a big project to work on.”

After extensive study and writing about how to repair the disintegrating flag, Chervenock asked her teacher if it was a real artifact, and if she could repair it. Her teacher said yes, starting a six-week journey to bring the flag back to its former plundering glory.

“It was really nerve-racking at times because the skull and crossbones was in really bad shape. It had fallen into over 50 pieces,” she says. “It had a lot of gunpowder on it and some burns from shot going through it.”

Though she wanted to remove the dirt and grime that was degrading the fabric, she saw the gunpowder as a telling piece of the flag’s sordid past. It was an element of history in a flag about which relatively little is known.

“It was captured in battle in 1780 by (an ancestor) of the man who now owns it, so it’s at least that old,” she says.

In order to restore the blood-red flag, Chervenock coated fine silk fabric in adhesive and put the skull and crossbones back together like a puzzle. She then stitched that back onto the cleaned flag. Based on her research, pirate flags like the one she worked on are a relatively rare find.

“I couldn’t find any other ones that had been treated,” she says.

The weeks spent on restoration were exacting work and required hours bent over the flag.

“Working with really fine thread that you can’t even see, I’m afraid I’m going to go blind,” she says.

But Chervenock has found herself happy in the lab. She graduated from Western Washington University in 2004 with a bachelor’s in archaeology and history, but spending time in the dirt just didn’t appeal to her. She realized she would rather deal with the artifacts once they make it out of the ground.

“When I went to field school I realized being out and digging wasn’t my thing,” she says of her move to lab work. “I also really liked embroidery, so I thought, ‘What if I could combine the two?’ ”

Chervenock will graduate from Winchester when she’s done with her dissertation on the effects of gunpowder on textiles — a topic inspired by the pirate flag. After that she will work with a private firm in England, where she can find more variety in her work than she would at a museum. While visiting the center’s private conservation firm, she saw people working to repair a pair of late Queen singer Freddie Mercury’s faux-leather pants right alongside a pair of 800-year-old leggings from an archbishop of Canterbury.

“You never know what you’re going to get.”