I have another commission i’ve started this month that came from a priest who had completed her training at Ripon College in Oxford. She asked if I could base it on the Bishop Edward King chapel at the college. Having visited the chapel when my sister was there I knew it was a beautiful, light, modern space, with soaring timbers leading your eyes upward to the most beautiful ceiling.
I loved the second photograph above and based my design directly on it, wanting to get across the sense of light and contrast between the wooden beams.
To get the right level of contrast between the colours I started off working up two different samples to see which way worked best. one with the white silk on the top going down three layers to the dark gold fabric on the bottom and the second with the dark gold on the top and the white at the bottom. After much deliberation, it was decided that it would be best to use the white silk on top with this design.
I used four layers of silk, white, ivory, light gold & dark gold.
Having transferred my initial design onto tracing paper, I tacked this to the four layers of silk and then using a small straight stitch followed all the design lines on the tracing paper, this binds the 4 layers together and creates the shapes ready to cut through the layers to the different colours.
Once all the lines had been stitched I could then tear off all the tracing paper from the back leaving the design ready for the final stitching.
I hope you like seeing these pictures of the process I go through, I’ll post again when I’ve completed a little more.