Commissions
St Catherine’s Chapel in Norwich Cathedral is a space available to people of all faiths or none. My brief for designing an altar frontal specified that there be no Christian iconography or ecclesiastical colours. A feeling of Light, Peace, Growth, Stillness and Silence was suggested as was the choice of sea-green and blue as the colour scheme.
I dyed silk dupion in 24 shades for the front and sides together with 32 shades of cotton sateen for the back. I also used around 20 colours of silk from my personal collection of fabrics and only bought 4 new silks pieces.
The design was largely inspired by a sketch by Sonia Delaunay that was included in the recent exhibition of her work in Tate Modern. An essential aspect of the design was that it could be made up in sections so that there was no need to work with large heavy pieces until late on in the construction process. I produced a design sketch of my ideas for consideration by the Fabric Advisory Committee of the Cathedral and it was accepted.
The Process
I made full scale pattern pieces of each of ten sections, 2 each for the front and back, two sides and four corners, and used them to cut out the backing of cotton drill and wadding.
The pattern was then copied so that I could cut out the individual pattern pieces one by one and apply to each colour in a chosen sequence on grain and adding allowance for turnings top and bottom. The top edge was turned and pressed and then pinned to the backing and wadding.
After building up four or five strips each with around 32 pieces I would then machine them in place using polyester invisible thread and a very reduced blanket stitch. The pieces were then butted up to each other and zigzagged together from the front and then bias tape was applied over the seam on the back and zigzagged again. To finish I made bias tape in silk which was placed over the front seam and stitched on with the reduced blanket stitch.
I estimate that there are around 2,000 individual pieces in the design and I used 62 metres of cotton bias tape on the back so there is the same amount of silk bias on the outside. The completed altar cloth measures about 3.3 by 2.6 metres and was installed in mid May 2016 and will remain on permanent display.
