A stitch in time…

On the tenth anniversary of the Guild of St Clare, Joseph Shaw looks at a new scheme to sponsor training in hand embroidery

The Guild of St Clare was founded in 2009, as a group dedicated to the making and restoration of vestments for the traditional liturgy, and for the promotion of domestic sewing. It is affiliated to the Latin Mass Society, and has active groups in London and Oxford.

For two years now, an ongoing project of the Guild has been the Latin Mass Society’s own collection of vestments. The Society has never had a lot of fine vestments, although in recent years we have used bequests to buy excellent vintage Green and Black High Mass sets. Our collection is dominated, instead, by items from the era before the Second Vatican Council, which have been given to us, or rescued by our supporters from being thrown away. Their provenance is not usually recorded, but they must come from parishes and religious communities all over the country.

Though generally lacking silk embroidery or gold bullion, these ‘everyday’ vestments were made with fine liturgical fabrics which are no longer available, and represent the patient skill, and no doubt in many cases the pennies of the poor, of our predecessors in the Faith. They deserve to be preserved, whenever possible, and used for the purpose which they were created to dignify: the Church’s ancient liturgy.

The Blessing of Throats on the Feast of St Blaise took place at a Guild Sewing Retreat.

In nearly all cases these vestments are in need of small, or not so small, repairs: the reattachment of trims, the patching of worn-out areas (the shoulders are often the first places to go), and the replacement of missing items such as burses, chalice veils, and maniples. In the case of High Mass sets, the Guild has undertaken to replace a humeral veil for a set which was using a poorly-made and poorly-matching one: this alone is a significant project, simply because of its size.

In some cases, restoration involves the unpicking of botched or amateurish repairs. While we do not claim that the Guild’s work is of museum quality, it is all done to the highest possible standards for the glory of God, and all undertaken by unpaid volunteers.

Mending: Vestments are traditionally constructed and embellished using techniques quite distinct from those of dress-making

This work is an opportunity, for those doing it, to learn first-hand about traditional vestments, their proportions, the materials used, and their methods of construction, and Guild collaborators are constantly learning and improving their skills.

Work on LMS vestments has proceeded alongside similar work on vestments belonging to priestly benefactors to the Guild, such as retreat-givers. We have had sewing days in the LMS Office itself, in the Guild’s Sewing Retreats, and most recently in sewing days on Saturdays in London. In some cases, members have continued to work on items at home between sessions. Inevitably, the more one looks at an old vestment, the more small repairs turn out to be needed, but progress has been steady. As well as repairs, the Guild has been sewing in labels to identify the Society’s vestments in relation to a complete catalogue of our holdings.

A future phase of work will be to look at those vestments belonging to the Society stored outside the Office.

LMS Vestment Exchange

One of the things which has emerged from a thorough investigation of the Latin Mass Society’s vestment presses (aka second-hand architect’s drawers), is a considerable number of non-matching items. In addition to a number of chasubles which lack most or all of their supporting items (for a Low Mass set, burse, chalice veil, maniple, and stole), we turned out to have a small mountain of burses, chalice veils, maniples, and stoles with no chasuble, or anything else, to go with them.

Some of these, admittedly, were not worthy of further liturgical use. In a few cases this was because of wear and tear, but others exemplified the collapse of taste, and contempt for technical skills, which accompanied what Cardinal Ratzinger called the collapse of the liturgy. In disposing of these according to the norms of the Church with regard to blessed objects (they were cut up and burned), the present writer salvaged eleven pairs of the square boards used in burses.

For the ones worth saving, one might ask why we do not simply match the lonely chasubles with the orphaned maniples, stoles and so on? In some cases, we have indeed completed sets of vestments with non-matching items. For the overwhelming majority, however, they do not ‘go’. The range of liturgical fabrics and trims in use before the Second Vatican Council was clearly much greater than that available today, to say nothing of the shades of each liturgical colour, and Roman vs. Gothic styles. One would need a library of hundreds of burses, say, to have a decent chance of finding a good match for any given chasuble.

Whereas we hope in time to make from scratch the missing items needed to make the chasubles useable again, we are clearly never going to use the vast majority of these ‘small’ items: and every now and then more of them arrive in the Office.

A chalice veil made by the Guild

We have decided, therefore, to make them available beyond the Society, for a small sum designed to cover our expenses, in the hope that they will provide a good enough match to complete other sets, in vestment presses of parishes around England and Wales, and perhaps beyond. If a dozen priests, looking for a few items each, peruse our collection of sixteen white maniples, nine green burses, five black chalice veils, and so on, it may be that a few happy marriages can be arranged. And for our part, we can face the arrival of the next bag of homeless liturgical ephemera with an idea of what to do with it.

A catalogue of what we have, with photographs, can now be seen on the LMS website as part of our online shop.

Training Sponsorship Scheme

One happy aspect of the Guild’s sewing events is that tasks can be found for people at all levels of skill and experience, from repairing fine hand embroidery to unpicking seams. The involvement of people with advanced, and highly specific, skills is, however, indispensable.

Vestments are traditionally constructed and embellished using techniques quite distinct from those of dress-making. Cheap vestments which do not use traditional techniques never hang right, and a serious knowledge of hand embroidery techniques is absolutely necessary before repairs to embroidery can be attempted. The Guild is fortunate in currently having two active members who have completed the Certificate Course at the Royal School of Needlework (RSN).

The RSN was established in 1872 to revive, employ, and pass on historic hand embroidery and related skills. As well as conservation work for museums, they make and repair liturgical items for major churches and undertake commissions from the Royal Family. The RSN represents the gold standard both in terms of the authenticity of the historic techniques it teaches, and the skills successful completion of its courses implies.

Hart at work

To take forward and expand its work, the Guild needs more input from people with RSN training. With this in mind, the Latin Mass Society is launching a scheme to sponsor students through the RSN’s Certificate Course.

The Certificate requires eight days’ attendance at one of its centres for each of four modules, in addition to work done at home. The RSN headquarters are at Hampton Court Palace in London, with additional centres in Bristol, Rugby, Durham, Glasgow, and overseas. The flexibility of the course lies in the fact that tuition days can be done in quick succession or spread out over up to four years, and can be timed to suit the individual student.

The main expense of the course is for these tuition days, which currently cost £135 each. Thanks to a benefaction specific to this scheme, the Society is offering to pay half of this cost for a sponsored student, up to a limit of £2,000 a year.

Anyone can apply for this sponsorship; candidates will be assessed on the basis of their enthusiasm for the work and their commitment to the aims of the Guild of St Clare. The successful candidate will undertake to attend at least one of the Guild’s two sewing retreats each year.

Handing on traditional skills

The deadline is 15th June, and we hope to interview shortlisted Handing on traditional skills candidates in the last week of June. Assuming suitable candidates present themselves, we will make one award to start in September, and one or two more in subsequent years.

Full details, including how to apply, are on the Latin Mass Society’s website.

All photos by Joseph Shaw