Altar Linen Projects – Beginnings

Church Altar Linen Projects – Beginnings:

Altar Linen Hand Embroidery Designs have been floating all over the place recently in the Ecclesiastical Sewing Studio. The designs all come from a collection of vintage perforated patterns that once belonged to a monastery in Boston.* The original fragile designs that are on vellum paper can no longer be used as transfer designs. The Church Embroidery designs have been scanned and are now on my computer, awaiting their turn in the queue to be run through a vector graphics program to be cleaned up. They wait in files for printing, in case someone might stitch them one day. There are many boxes of these special vintage hand embroidery designs awaiting scanning in the hopes that after a hundred years of neglect, someone might use them again to beautify altar linens.

History of Vintage Hand Embroidery Designs

This is one of the Ecclesiastical Hand Embroidery Designs from my collection of vintage patterns that came from that Boston monastery that was used over 100 years ago. One can still see all of the pounce powder on the original pattern.  The original Altar linen design is very tiny, only about 2 to 3 inches in size.  It is a perforated hand embroidery design on thin tracing vellum paper. It was so tiny and small, and impossible to pass over. The IHC hand embroidery is so simple and clean. It starts one thinking about stitching options. The first thought that comes to mind is the use of a trailing stitch as the outline with a seed stitch as the filling.  Or it could even be done in something as simple as a split stitch outline.

For those who might be a bit more adventurous, a padded satin stitch for the letters would work nicely, provided the overall size of the embroidery design.  While thinking initially of whitework, consider working this design with long and short stitch filling, outlining it with gold threads for a lovely effect. This would make a nice project for a beginning embroiderer.

So how about you, any thoughts or ideas on how to hand embroider this design?  For your convenience, the design is available as a download with the link below.

Solo Dei Gloria

Be sure to visit our online store front Ecclesiastical Sewing where you may shop for Liturgical Fabrics, altar linen fabrics, church vestment-making patterns, liturgical machine embroidery designs,  church vestment trims and notions and so much more. You may also find us on  Ecclesiastical Sewing on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Sign up for our mailing list at the bottom of the page on our online store front and receive a free copy of our Small Linens Booklet as our way of saying thank you for following along.

Small IHC with scroll detail 3.2 x 4.75

*N.B. This embroidery design and all hand embroidery designs made available on Ecclesiastical Sewing come from my vast library of vintage patterns and books, dating back to the period of the mid-1870s to 1930. I possess the original designs, have restored them, and offer them here for the private use of those reading this blog.

You might find this short video about pressing linen interesting.

Designs for Church Embroidery: an Original Copy

Hand Embroidery Design for Altar Linens

Stole Making: A Little Encouragement

The New Church Year Begins December 2, 2018

Identifying an Embroidery Design

Altar Linens

The Process of Making Vintage Embroidery Patterns Usable

Vintage Liturgical Embroidery Library

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