Needling

Valerie's mother frequents car-boot sales and other such events and a couple of years ago passed to her some items of ecclesiastical fabric. Now Valerie is a member of a Baptist congregation in Guildford which, with the best will in the world, has little use for such things so she in turn gave them to Marion our then curate. I was amazed to discover that one bit was in fact a complete black requiem altar frontal and that was soon pressed into use as we didn't have one - I'd been making do with a big bit of black cloth spread over the altar. But the other was a large piece of predominately red fabric, somewhat on the garish side but still rather splendid for that. We already have a nice red altar frontal so we thought this cloth could be used for a cope. Our in-house seamstress Pat felt hulking about large bits of fabric was beyond her and I found myself thinking, Well, a cope isn't a very complicated garment, so what was stopping me having a go at it? I used my own cope as a pattern and with a bit of amendment to work around the shape of the red, some red velvet from Hertfordshire, red cloth lining from the local craft shop, braid from the Ukraine and trim from Thailand (!), this was the result. My sewing is not up to much if you look carefully but from a distance it's OK: I made a few mistakes which had to be rectified and even after it was all done found a pin buried in the lining which somehow I'd missed and had to be wiggled carefully out, but overall I am pleased. I produced the cope in the odd half-hour here and there, and it has renewed my admiration for people like my friend Archangel Janet who do this for a living and often find - if they are freelance makers - that their clients have shockingly unrealistic expectations of how much they should pay for what is actually long, painstaking and hard work.

I must confess that in sixteen years of ministry I have only worn a red cope once, when we had a children's mass one Pentecost Day and Choral Evensong later on, and on that occasion I borrowed it. But it's good to have and makes use of something that might otherwise go to waste. Unless my stitching is worse than I realise and it falls apart!