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FABRICS Once again, let me remind you of my belief that the beauty of our vestments depends upon excellence of design and the quality of our workmanship. I don't care how much money you throw at a set of vestments, if your design isn't right or your workmanship is shabby, the quality of the vestments will suffer. How skillful do you need to be in order to construct vestments competently? Intermediate. For the most part, vestments are simple garments and paraments are simple hangings. The actual sewing is not difficult or complex. You need to know how to adjust your sewing machine's tensions - both upper and lower - to allow for various thicknesses. The other thing you need to know are 'the tricks of the trade'. That's what my books and patterns are all about: telling you the tricks of the trade; helping you to see the orderly progression from design through construction to completion of each project. That's my ministry - to help you with that. I want you to keep this in mind as you look at this page titled: 'Fabrics'. I know all these fabrics; I've worked with them and have been pleased with the way they handle and the results they have produced for me. I offer only the liturgical colors and I offer them in a wide range of shades. My fabrics are designed to span the price spectrum for you. The cost of these fabrics range from $12/yard to $200/yard. Let me tell you a story: We have a famous vestment supply house here in the United States. Their vestments are known for their design excellence - and their high prices. They also utilize a construction technique that is of some interest to me and that I wanted to examine up close and personal. The only way I could do that was to buy one and open it up. While I didn't want to pay the price, my curiosity finally overcame me and I spent the money. My dear friend, Elizabeth South, was with me the day UPS delivered the vestment to my door. We had that vestment opened up before the UPS truck had left my driveway! And, it was worth the money to see their construction technique. Not until after we'd examined all its inner workings, did we really look at the design of this vestment. I have it hanging in my workroom and am looking at it right now. The design is dependent upon a trim overstatement - it's gaudy. The fit is very peculiar - the thing will not lie properly. More importantly, the body of the vestment is an inappropriate fabric. It's polyester. There is nothing wrong with polyester as long as it's GOOD polyester! This is the slippy, slick kind. I don't like it at all and I would be ashamed to offer it to you - I wouldn't. This is the type of thing we're trying to get away from. You know it and I know it. I want to help you produce lovely, handsome, high quality vestments that are financially suitable to your requirements. So, let's begin looking at fabrics and how they can be used to meet our needs. I offer three types of fabrics: Polyester ($12/yard), Dupioni Silk ($15 and $20/yard) and the great damasks, brocades and tapestries ($35 - $200/yard). Polyester ($12/yard) - This is a simple, plain-weave fabric, 60 inches wide that has never let me down - it's my 'work-horse' fabric. Absolutely dependable. It comes in white, off-white, Pentecost red, dark, forest green, medium grass green, Roman purple, violet and rose. All these colors are true liturgical shades. Sometimes we need to produce vestments quickly - without spending huge amounts of time on them (for our children's camps that haven't a sacristy or for a special Sunday School production, or Christmas pagent for instance). While my Simple + Beautiful techniqe works well with most fabrics, it works especially well with the smooth surface of this polyester. If you use a metallic lame', the effect is of painted-on liquid gold or silver. We needed a glorious miter for St. Nicholas a few years ago. I reached for this polyester and did amazing things with golden lame'! Simple + Beautiful. I think of this fabric as 'the simple little black dress' that can be dressed up or dressed down. It will support embroidery or cross-stitch well. Orphreys of pieced or appliqued quilting are wonderful - as are orphreys of cotton velveteen. You can take this fabric all the way up and use one of the great tapestries for orphreys. (This is often done - use a very moderately priced base-fabric and then shoot the moon on orphreys.) There are numberous damasks and brocades that will do the same thing for less money. St. Margaret gives wide, seven-inch, orphreys centered on roses and comes in luscious deep green/gold, red/gold, black/gold and blue/gold. For almost half the cost of St. Margaret, Evesham is one of the most useful of the brocades, coming in white, red, green purple blue and gold. This good polyester is a solid starting point if you're thinking about your first chasuble or super-frontal or chalice veil. It is easy to draw a thread on this fabric so you have a good straight edge. If you are making a chasuble and want to line it, because this fabric is slightly drapey, you would use a firm poly/cotton lining, the polyester will roll over at the hem rather than having the lining droop below the hem - a common problem. I recommend this fabric to you. Dupioni Silk (44 inch - $15/yard, 54 inch - $20/yard) - Entirely different fabric. It's nubby and, instead of being a bit drapey, Dupioni has a crispness to it. Being silk, it has a soft 'glow' - not shiny like satin - a real 'glow'. The colors tend to be 'luscious'. Many of the colors are woven of one color along the warp and another color along the weft; this causes the fabric to change shades, depending on where you're standing. It's an odd sensation. If you piece this fabric length to width, the difference in shade is often quite dramatic. Here's a photograph of a prototype stole:
You could cut a chasuble along the length of the fabric and cut the orphrey along the width. Interesting effect! Dupioni makes wonderful stoles! The colors are so true and the lovely sheen is just right. Dupioni Silk comes in many colors and shades: Dark green, medium green, moss green, a vivid blue, rose, Pentecost red, Holy Week red, white, off-white, magenta (Roman purple), violet, black, silver, wedding-ring gold, old gold. To my mind, there is no fabric better suited for copes than Dupioni Silk - the crisp body cannot be beat because it makes the cope 'move' in action. (And, you should not line a cope made of Dupioni because the lining will damp down the crispmess.) For orphreys, you can choose from a wide range of designs - cotton velveteen, a costrasting shade of Dupioni, the tapestries, brocades and damasks, embroidered or quilted pieces. Used for copes, the fabric moves and drapes well. Here's a picture a customer sent me of a perfectly lovely design - look at the quilting for the orphreys!
For chasubles, Dupioni is a bit too crisp. Chasubles need to be drapier. We handle this by rinsing or washing the Dupioni; which takes the crispness out. I had one customer who simply put the whole piece of fabric through the washer - and it did just fine. I'm not quite that brave! I rinse it in the sink. Of course, it wrinkles but irons out easily. The color will run but the change in shade is barely noticeable. The thing I like most about Dupioni chasubles is the the way those luscious colors work together. Last year, I had a customer make a strong Holy Week chasube in the deep, wine red with black orphreys and lined it with the old gold. Amazing! Elizabeth Smith embroidered a crucifix with a border of thorns. I was fortunate to have that chasuble in my workroom for a few days. It was a powerful presence. Dupioni is a good thing - as Martha would say. My polyester and silk samples are sent on request. I want you to see a photograph of a lovely stole that was sent to me by the customer who designed it -
I love to receive photographs of your work!
Now we're into what I think of as 'The Great Liturgical Fabrics' - the traditional ecclesiastical damasks, brocades and tapestries. These fabrics have been known and loved for generations. These fabrics are all imported from the manufacturer, M. Perkins & Son, in England. I invite you to visit their website: www.MPerkins.co.uk. This collection of Perkins fabrics is extrordiary, not just because of their high quality but also because there are so many. Usually, you see only a few. And, for the most part, the few that you are shown are of similar repeat sizes. Let me define what I mean by the terms 'damask', 'brocade' and 'tapestry': A 'damask' is all one color with the pattern woven in. A 'brocade' is the same thing except that the pattern is picked out in a metallic thread - gold or silver. A 'tapestry' is a multi-colored fabric. While the photographs shown below show what the patterns look like, they cannot represent the actual colors. Wonderful though the Internet is, it does not transmit colors accurately. The green I see on my screen may be entirely different from the green you see on your screen. Also keep in mind that all of these fabrics come in all of the liturgical colors. Just because Ely Crown is shown in green doesn't mean that Ely Crown comes ONLY in green. Ely Crown comes also in a great wine red, a creamy white and a rich violet. The same is true of all the other patterns. Some of the photographs are deceptive. A good example is the fabric 'Wakefield'. This fabric contains a great deal of gold (which does not show in the photo). Wakefield is a truly gorgeous fabric - and you'd never know it from the photo. Wakefield is reversible and the two sides look entirely different. One side is mainly gold with a soft appearance. The other side is literally brilliant with the dominant color of the fabric vibrant against the gold. The photographs also cannot show the differences in repeat size. While the size of the Chelmsford pattern appears to be similar to that of St. Nicholas, the Chelmsford repeat is 7 1/2 inches and the St. Nicholas repeat is 27 inches. You also cannot see the shades of the colors in these photographs. The St. Nicholas shade of green is very different from the Fairford shade of green and the St. Margaret shade is different from both. The early part of the design process involves answering three questions: You budget requirements, which color the project will be and the scale or repeat size appropriate for your project. Once you have these three design decisions made, you'll be ready to look at samples. Samples will tell you which shade of the color is most satisfactory in your worship space. If you want to see better pictures of these fabrics, go to the M. Perkins & Son website at: www.MPerkins.co.uk Now that I've told you what these photographs are not good foor, let me suggest what they are good for: It's my experience that we've become accustomed to seeing only a few ecclesiastical fabric patterns - the 'standards' of Agnus Dei, Ely Crown, Tudor Rose, Normandy and the Coronation tapestry. These photos give you an excellent opportunity to view many other handsome, traditional liturgical patterns. Designing Vestments Using the 'Traditional' Fabrics: Please remember what I believe: The beauty of our vestments depends upon excellence of design and the quality of our workmanship; not upon how much money we spend. These traditional fabrics cost more than my polyesters and silks. The prices begin at around $30/yard and top out at about $200/yard. Many parishes are able and happy to spend a great deal of money on their vestments. Many are not - and yet, would love to use these fabrics. And, this is possible! I often help people design lovely vestments in which the major fabric is one of the silks or polyesters and a small amount of one of the traditional fabrics is used for decoration. The effect is excellent! You will see this design used often in the ready-made vestment catalogues. I not infrequently receive a request to 'Send me a sample of every fabric you have in all the colors available'. Gracious! I can't do that! The expense quite aside, I'd spend half my life cutting! The process of designing vestments follows an orderly and useful progression. Let's talk about that: Budget: The first thing you need to do is determine how much you want to spend: How much the entire project will cost. There's no sense looking at $200/yard fabric if your budget is telling you $40/yard. That's just silly. Color: Once you've set your budget, you need to decide which color you'll be using. Our liturgical colors are a significant consideration for vestment makers. The more we understand about our color traditions, the richer our designs will be liturgically. As we begin to speak about vestment construction, I'd like you to take a few minutes to visit a very special website that discusses our liturgical colors. This site was put up by a priest in my diocese and I think he did an excellent job with it. I hope you enjoy it and find it as useful and informative as I have. http://fullhomelydivinity.org/articles/colors%20full%20page.htm The matter of color is made more complex by the consideration of which shade of the color: What shade of the color will work best in your worship space? A large, brightly lit worship space will respond differently to the shade of a color than will a more intimate space that is softly lit. This is an issue you cannot consider until you have samples in your hands. And, of course, you can only make these decisions standing in the middle pews. You can't 'see' how the shade will 'work' if you're looking at it from 12 inches away - or sitting at your kitchen table! People forget that. Scale: This has to do with the size of the repeat and its relationship to the vestments you will be constructing. If you are designing only a stole, you'll want to settle on a pattern that is small (Chelmsford or Ely Crown, for instance). But, if you're also making the chasuble to go with the stole, you'll want to choose a pattern that is larger because a small pattern on a large area will tend to look busy - the scale will be wrong and the vestment will appear unbalanced. In this case, you might consider Fairford or Winchester or St. Margaret or Florence. If you're going to construct a large frontal (and you can afford it!), you'll want to look at St. Nicholas with its 27 inch repeat - or, Florence is wonderful for frontals. So: Long before you even think of looking at fabric samples, you should have made these three decisions - Budget, Color, Scale. When you can give me that information, I know immediately which samples you need to see. For more information about the individual fabrics, please contact me at obunny@roadrunner.com and request the Online Fabric Catalogue. I will send you this catalogue by email attachment. This catalogue will allow you to go back to the photographs and examine them with better information. From here, we can go forward to consider which samples are appropriate for your project. I do request a sample deposit of $25 for samples of these traditional fabrics. This deposit will be refunded to you when my samples come home to me. Or, you may put the deposit toward a purchase. I know my fabrics. I've used these fabrics for decades. They're good friends of mine. Let me help you with your decision making process. If you will give me your decisions about these three things, I can make your fabric decision so much easier - and, a great deal more efficient. Budget, Color, Scale
Here they are! I hope you enjoy them! Click on any thumbnail image to view an enlarged
photo of the pattern
Keep in mind that I often have remnants and, when I have something that may be appropriate for your project, I will suggest them to you. From time to time, I also have substantial short bolts of fabrics available. The good thing about them is that they are already in the United States; you don't have the shipping costs from England. At this very moment in time, I have yardage of red St. Margaret and red Ely Crown. Also keep in mind that I can help you with trims and fringes too. |
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