Creating for Creationtide
Our Project to celebrate Creationtide 2019
By Hilary Gooding
St Michael and All Angels in Colehill is blessed with a congregation full of creative talent willing to join in with any schemes and ideas to celebrate festivals and seasons. Our latest project has been to decorate the church for Creationtide.
The first part of the project was to make six Pulpit Falls/wall hangings and the second to create an air of celebration about Creationtide in the church.
Our lovely church is an Arts and Crafts design with beautiful dark pillars and beams. We have been able to string black paracord between the pillars which blends in and is discreet. To create the feeling of a Creationtide celebration we hung coloured ribbons along six parallel cords each representing one of the days. The first cord had just black and yellow ribbons for the blackness and then light. The second cord (Day 2) had the black and yellow plus two blues for the heavens and the water. Day three had black, yellow, two blues plus brown for the land and green for the plants. And so on until Day 6 which had built up to a riot of colour. From Day 3 to Day 6 the congregation coloured and cut out pictures representing the things that were created and these were hung up with the ribbons on their respective days. To finish off we hung signs with text from the Bible in the centre of these decorated cords. It certainly created a sense of celebration of God’s creation.
The textile hangings were put together by members of the congregation meeting for special craft days where they cut up fabric, then arranged and glued the pieces and pictures on a background. Where we couldn’t find commercial fabric with the pictures we needed we used t-shirt transfer paper to print images on fabric and cut them out. These sessions were full of bright ideas and chat and laughter. From a cautious beginning their imaginations soon took off and they came up with wonderful ideas. I am a quilter so finished off the hangings with felt on the back and a layer of net on the front to protect all the little pieces and quilted to suit the images. They measure 22” x 16”.
In the past we have used the cords to hang white paper doves (Remembrance Day 2018), Christmas with angels and stars and Easter with paper daffodils and decorated eggs. The group is keen to know what next?!
Below are the six pulpit frontal the group made:
Here are some photos from our special Creationtide service:
