Stitching Faith & Community

This photo was taken by a friend, Joslin McKinney on a walk over Shatton Edge, Hope Valley. She
didn’t think of it as a religious image, but as soon as I saw it on her
Facebook thread, I asked if I might use it an an Easter image at Edale
Methodist Chapel.

As the chapel has been undergoing extensive renovations for
the past 5 years we got used to putting images and poems up on the board and
grounds outside, even holding our monthly services outdoors, or (safely) under
scaffolding. By summer 2024 the chapel had new floors, ceiling, water, a
toilet, heating and also a blank wall where the original 2-tiered pulpit, and
then an old harmonium, had provided a centrepiece. While we wanted clear walls
for hanging exhibitions and projecting films, the chapel felt unfocused.
Joslin’s image seemed perfect if we could scale it up and maybe make the
landscape more local to Edale.

We have very talented craftspeople in the village, weavers,
felt and lace makers, embroiderers and a
rope maker, so decided to interpret the image into a textile – with felted
stones, applique landscape, embroidered
sky with lace clouds and a coil of handmade cord instead of the galvanised
wire.

Over many Tuesday afternoons between October 2024 and June
this year we washed local fleeces, teased out the ‘fluff’ and learned wet felt
making. Once we had a wonderful variety of pieces, the wall and post were
needle felted onto a thick black wool serge.
The landscape was pinned and sewn from found fabrics, bits of
knitting, and wool overstitching. The
sky was separately embroidered with lace clouds worked in and we learned rope
making with foraged stems, – nettles, daffodils and reeds.

The textile was finally hung in the chapel this June on a
specially made shepherd’s crook and the coils of rope pinned into place. We
were amazed to see how the untrimmed rope looked like a crown of thorns and its
circle did exactly the same as the wire in the original photograph, it made the
broken wooden post and two paler stones behind it read like a cross. So Edale
Chapel has a central image again, – one we can roll up and put away when necessary, but is otherwise
there to invite engagement and contemplation, to affirm our place , the lives
lived in it, and the mission that drives it.

Kate Burnett, Trustee and Renovation Co-ordinator, Edale Methodist Chapel

You can read more inspirational stories like these in our autumn district magazine – Rooted and Reimagined, Church for Today's World.