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 a transfer design. 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 are in files waiting printing on the off-chance they might be stitched 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.

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 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 the first thoughts are of whitework, this design would be lovely worked with long and short stitch filling, outlined with gold threads. 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

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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 time period of the  mid 1870’s to 1930.  The original designs are in my possession, and have been restored  and are offered here for the private use of those reading this blog.