Defiantly Pink

What has been called the pinkification of the life of little girls annoys me colossally, the latest manifestation being when I went to buy Easter eggs for my nieces and found Thornton's were marketing a pair of gender-coded eggs, one pink with a butterfly on it and one blue with a football. This perhaps only increases the transgressive delight of celebrating the middle Sunday of Lent in rose-pink, as we did at Swanvale Halt this weekend (you can do the same on the middle Sunday of Advent, and in some places on Holy Innocents Day just after Christmas). A couple of years ago I dragged an old pink altar frontal out of the chest in church and began using it, but my pink vestments have only just been rendered even half suitable for public exposure. 

When I bought the green set off eBay the same seller was also selling a pink set for under £50, so I thought, why not complete the range, and bought that too. This was the only photograph available of it, showing just the chasuble. It was rather striking, I thought, a darkish pink with black or dark grey embroidery.

It was an object lesson in photographic indeterminacy. The background pink turned out to be a considerably lighter shade than it appeared, and the pattern of grey rushes was painted onto the fabric rather than embroidered. I don't know the age of the piece, but unsurprisingly the paint was cracked and flaking. Possibly worst of all, the braid around the orphreys and the edge of the chasuble, only just visible in the photo, was a sort of tangled silver wire which made the whole thing look as though it was recycled from truly distressingly fancy knicker fabric. It was entirely unusable, as was made clear to me when I shared its existence with others. I asked Janet the Goth embroiderer for advice: 'That is a slinky pinky number' she said, disconcertingly.

It was obvious that the orphreys had to be covered up, so I did that with a vermilion red brocade. Sewing it around the silver bullion roundel in the middle of the back was particularly tricky and hard-going. 

Next I had to obscure that offensive silvery braid, and found some nice broad machined braid with a light gold and maroon ivy-like pattern on a deep purply-brown background, which covered the wire. I felt I ought to leave the crosses on the stole and maniple exposed, so there you can still see what the original decoration was like. 

There was still rather too much of the original pink silk around, and though I'd considered dyeing it with a deep red pattern a bit of experimentation on the inside of the chasuble failed so miserably I realised there was no other option than just covering up more of it with additional red brocade panels around the orphreys. These I edged with a different sort of braid, as you can see in this picture:

The final result is bold, but in the context of the church building and in combination with the altar frontal not completely displeasing:

All that cloth as well as the silver bullion bits makes it the most massively weighty of my vestment sets and even I have to admit that the maniple is a bit of a liability.

However my friend Fr Peter Edwards of Bathwick has just had a very fine rose-pink Gothic set donated to the church which is doubtless much easier to manage: