This banner was created for an art exhibit in St. Louis and is now used by my church as an altar backdrop for the childrens’ service.  The theme was creation, and I immediately had a vision in mind.  But when I couldn’t find a pleasing way to transition between images of each day of creation in a single banner, I decided to give each day its own narrow (6-inch-wide) panel. As each day of creation is visualized, the design, fabrics and color palette all get more chaotic, until the final day of rest, which is represented by a translucent panel.

This very large, double-sided banner was made to represent my church in St. Louis and hangs in the Episcopal Cathedral downtown. I wanted the banner to reflect the blending of the traditional and contemporary elements of our worship and highlight the unique character of our parish family. The Eucharist is central to our worship, so the chalice and host was a natural choice of image.  The text is set in an elegant older font, but the irregular outlining of the chalice is a modern touch. The host is comprised of small squares of fabrics donated by members of the church. Some of those squares lay outside the outline of the host, because we are well known for pushing the boundaries in our worship, service and community, and there are empty areas in the host because there is always room for new people to join us.  I think this banner represents the nature of our faith community as well as any single object could.

Inspiration can come from the most unexpected places.  When a client wanted a set of red vestments that could be used for Pentecost and Palm Sunday, I struggled to come up with a design that was fiery, but not too fiery.  Then I saw a picture of a Celtic tattoo that did just what I was trying to do.  By limiting the color palette to bright red, dark red and gold metallic, the finished design works beautifully for both celebrations.

A client had received from one of her parishioners a beautiful woven fabric from Africa.  The fabric was woven as a joint venture of the men and women of their village.  The men created the design and the women did the weaving (or possibly the other way around—I don’t quite remember who had which role.)  This priest wanted to use the fabric to make a pair of stoles, one for herself, and one for a male friend who was being ordained.  Once we found pleasing designs for a pair of stoles that belong together but aren’t identical, I asked a woman friend of mine to help me with the cutting, so at every level of the project, it was a joint venture between women and men.

An Episcopal woman in Kentucky was being ordained a deacon and pursuing a mission of communications. For an Easter stole, I thought about the women who proclaimed the good news of the resurrection. The white circle at the hip represents the empty tomb and the yellow is the sunrise. The gold and silver lines represent the message of the good news. There is also a small white cross, which, when viewed with the white circle, creates the female symbol, further highlighting the role of women in the Easter story.

After several years of specializing in abstract stoles with geometric designs, I wanted to try a symbol stole.  I have always been drawn to very large design motifs, often cropped in a very interesting way, that can be seen and enjoyed from a distance. Also, our brains are adept at filling in the missing part of an incomplete image. The genesis of this design was a piece of jewelry I saw at the St. Louis Art Fair.  It was a brooch of connected rings of silver and each ring was filled with felt in a brilliant shade of purple.  This inspired the cluster of grapes, both in color and arrangement.  I have always favored large design motifs, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that many people in our churches see their clergy from a substantial distance and I think they should be able to fully appreciate a stole from even the back pew.  When using such large images that cross over the gap between the two sides of the stole, the eye completes the image.  The end result is a completely contemporary version of familiar communion imagery.

I was commissioned to design a stole for a newly ordained woman from Sri Lanka.  As it happened, I had recently been on a shopping trip to Chicago and brought home several beautiful Indian shawls.  I used that shawl, added some silk dupioni and some symbols that were very meaningful to this woman and her heritage:  an oil lamp and lotus blossoms.   A beautiful stole that is perfectly suited to the client.