Our magnificent new kneelers are true works of art that involved the gifts and talents of many. Given in memory of and in thanksgiving for loved ones, they were blessed on Palm Sunday along with the new altar hangings and vestments.
It all started in the summer of ’08, when Interim Rector Ella Breckinridge approached Vicky Meyer about making kneelers for the sanctuary. It seems hard to believe now, but we had been kneeling on the carpeted floor at the altar rail. Vicky took on the task and tracked down Linda Mote, who had designed the chapel kneelers back in the mid-90’s. Mary Peebles headed up the chapel project.
Ms. Mote trained as an interior designer and artist and early in her career was introduced to needlework design. Over the past 30 years, with her reputation growing and spreading mostly through word of mouth, she has become a highly-sought-after liturgical designer of needlework for churches. Her work has recently been featured in Needlepoint Now Magazine and her projects grace churches in North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. She has worked with many different denominations.
Linda traveled to Aiken to refresh her memory of the church and to talk to Ella and Vicky about St. Thaddeus and the project. She took many detailed pictures of the church and grounds. Then she went home to take what was unique and significant to St. Thaddeus and began to process the designs. She painstakingly crafted and hand painted the custom artwork on needlepoint canvas and then assembled the canvasses into pillow kits with the appropriate yarns for completion. You can see how carefully thought out the designs are.
The scroll work on the sides of the pillows mirrors the brass scroll work at the altar rail. The grapes in the center cushion reflect the stained glass windows in back of the altar. The crosses in the center medallions of each pillow are different and are copied from St. Thaddeus’ processional crosses. And no two magnolias are alike. There is a special white cushion for weddings, stitched by Vicky and first used for the marriage of her daughter Margaret Meyer and Brien Grande.
The kits came back to St. Thaddeus where Vicky had assembled a group of stitchers waiting to take on the daunting expanses of canvas. True labors of love, talent, time, and treasure, each kneeler is the result of many hours of patient work and gifts of funds for the design work, materials, and finishing.
If I’ve done my math correctly, each pillow contains 213,640 stitches (123,480 for the tops and 90,160 for the sides) and there are six kneelers — totaling 1,281,840 stitches. That’s a lot! (I’m sure there is a formula for how many miles of yarn have been carefully placed on the canvas, or how many hundreds of woman hours were logged, but I’ll leave that for someone else to figure out.) That is why it took several years to finish the stitchery. And that is why Father Grant got involved and was hugely supportive of the project.
Linda took the completed canvasses back in January of this year and had them professionally finished and made into their final form. She also had the existing needlepoint seat cushions in the sanctuary reupholstered.
If you look on the back of each kneeler, you will see the stitcher’s initials and the dates of completion. It is humbling to realize that the kneelers will live on after those who provided them: Deborah Brooks Jones in loving memory of Patrick Brooks; Vicky Meyer in honor of the marriage of Margaret Meyer and Brien Grande; Henri Wade in loving memory of Edith Hahn Wade Anderson; Patsy Lewellyn in honor of her husband, Ronald Dale Lewellyn; Dee James in loving memory of The Reverend M. O. James and in thanksgiving for her children Libby, Hunter and Griffith; Susan Stribling in loving memory of her father, George Taliaferro Stribling; Cathy Harte in loving memory of Mr. and Mrs. John W. Harte, Sr. and Dr. William B.
Bates, Jr.; Halley Townsend in thanksgiving for her grandchildren; Ann Fornwald in thanksgiving for life’s many blessings; Erica Sanders in honor of her family. Judith Hoover also added stitches.
The kneelers will be admired and appreciated by all of us now as we approach the altar rail and in the future by the many who will follow. I like to think of each stitch in the kneelers as a prayer. All 1,281,840 of them!
