A week of contrasts....

They say a change is as good as a rest......

Monday started with me doing a lot of design work at the computer. I love this part but since "upgrading" to Windows 10 a couple of weeks ago, Photoshop has been playing up and making life difficult. I don't need it for the design part - but I do need it for creating images to show my clients to give them an idea of how the finished piece will look.

Tuesday I was off for a funeral, but worked from home in between times making our lovely Celtic hearts and tartan hearts.

On Wednesday I sort of took a day off - I was at the studio, but working on a personal project. My younger granddaughter Lauren is off to Glasgow to live with her boyfriend. He might have been prepared to live in a flat without curtains, but Lauren had other ideas...... So last weekend we had bought curtain fabric and on Wednesday I cleared the decks to make the curtains - big ones for a bay window of a traditional tenament flat. This is where my cutting table and my big, height-adjustable tables really come into their own as I could really spread things out. Even so, if I were going to do curtain making as a regular thing, I would want at least twice as much space! Lauren is into monochrome - plain dark grey curtains with a thick interlining, so quite boring and very heavy and bulky to work with. The family are off today to get her settled in so I look forward to seeing photographs of the curtains in place very soon.

Meanwhile, Mary was working with colour - by the bucket load. A rather stunning outfit that combines Royal Stewart tartan with rainbow satin. Definitely a combination to cheer you up on these cold winter days. It's for a special event that her client is performing at so can't show any photographs of the full outfit just yet.

On Thursday we started the day with a "staff meeting". We have a lot of planning to do for a trade event we will be at in January so we spent best part of the morning working out what we need to make for this and who will do what - and then we just "got on with it" - embroidery machines and sewing machines will be hard at work for the foreseeable future.

By Friday Mary and Rachel had had enough! They took the day off to help Lauren with her packing, while I was hard at work finishing an order of priests' stoles for Iona Abbey

and embroidering two more stoles for other orders.

This morning I am at home just now - just helped my husband install the new stained glass window I had made for his little chapel in the garden. It went in without incident - though I did have to take a file to a little blob of solder on the bottom edge that had got overlooked when I was making it. And now I am heading out to The Workshop - what will I be working on today.....?

Comments

A Guide to Commissioning a Liturgical Stole

This post is aimed at those who may never have purchased a stole before. Perhaps you are preparing for ordination or maybe you are commissioning a stole as a gift. There are so many possibilities for a stole that it is difficult for some people to know where to begin. Here I try to guide you through the process and ask you to consider many different things so that you can arrive at the right decision when it comes to making that purchase or placing an order. The stole is an ecclesiastical vestment worn by ordained clergy in most western Christian traditions during church services. The wearing of stoles goes back to the very earliest times of the Church and references Jewish traditions as described in The Old Testament. "And thou shalt make holy garments for Aaron thy brother for glory and for beauty" (Exodus 28:2). It is a long, narrow strip of cloth, usually embellished in some way and is normally in the specified colour for the liturgical ...

Designing vestments and paraments

Last spring I had a visit to my studio by an Episcopalian priest from Minnesota in the USA. We spent a lovely couple of hours looking at photographs of things I have made, fabrics that I use and discussing various making processes. He was impressed with what he saw and left promising that he would be in touch when he had discussed possibilities with people back home. I was surprised and delighted when he got in touch a couple of months later to ask if I would be willing to travel to Minnesota (at their expense) and visit their church - St Martin by the Lake, meet the congregation and come up with design proposals to make two sets of vestments and paraments. In October I packed my suitcase with sketch pads, paints and pencils and got a flight to Minneapolis. I was blessed with stunning autumn weather and the trees put on a magnificent display of reds and golds. Whenever I am asked to make paraments and vestments for a particular location I always try to have...

The Hilton of Cadboll Pictish Stone - a design for a stole

Here in the north of Scotland, we have been in a covid lockdown for a month. We have been told by the government to work from home if we can, so as I had lots of design work to do and no urgency on any of the making, I brought the computer home - good excuse because it's warmer here than in my workshop! The only interaction I have had with the rest of humanity has been through the medium of Zoom - for conversations with family, for church services and the occasional face-to-face with a client. A couple of weeks ago one such meeting took place and my client has commissioned me to design and make her ordination stole. In the past she had worked on the Hilton of Cadboll project which was a "millenium project" - part archaeological excavations and part having stone mason Barry Grove carve a replica of this famous Pictish stone. The original stands on display in the National Museum of Scotland. The "new" one is not so new now. Looking for my photographs of the r...

Our Textiles Workshop at Inchmore

Search This Blog