st. paul - Monk at Keyboard

I wanted to share again some other designs I have been working on. These are all things I did a while ago, the stoles were done in 2020, and the palls I did back in July this year.

Stoles

These stoles were one of the first things I started with as a practical way of testing patterns and making something that could be used. So here we have the Black Madonna and the Coat of Arms on one side and St. Paul the First Hermit and the Motto on the other.

I have tweaked all the embroidery patterns since I first did them. Looking at St. Paul on the stoles and the palls, you will notice some changes. One day, once I think I have got to a point where I will not keep changing them, I will share the machine files.

In the first image, you can see all the parts stitched onto a single piece of cloth before I cut it up to make the stoles.

Palls

Another practical test run of some of the designs. Here I have the Black Madonna, St. Paul the First Hermit again (with minor changes) Bl. Eusebius (best first switching of a pattern so far), a few Coat of Arms, and a Coptic Cross.

In a previous post, I explained how I made the palls in more detail, so I will not repeat all those details here.

If you look up close, for example, at the Coat of Arms that has the red and gold border, you can see little gaps between where colours join, hence why I am still working on it. This one here was just how it came from Hatch Digitizer after automatically importing the artwork. On the other hand, the Black Madonna with the fleur-de-lis in the corner is a design I am almost sure I have got as good as I will make it after a few trials (also one I painfully traced out from a relatively poor quality photo).

The last image has the full linen set for a chalice, the pall, purification, corporal and finger towel. Here is a video of what that looks like on a chalice.

Book Cover for Novena to St. Paul the First Hermit

So for a bit of background, in the Order of St. Paul the First Hermit, we keep a Novena to our Heavenly Patron, St. Paul of Thebes, for the nine days before his external Solemnity (that being the Sunday after the 15th of January). This Novena consists primarily of two hymns about him sung on alternative days. So naturally, these have been translated into several languages, including English.

I have collected together in this booklet (that I am hoping to get printed soon) both the English and Latin versions of these hymns. So what I did for this book of note is:

I typeset the music for it using LilyPond. However, I had already done that a while ago for the printing of the English version of the Order’s prayer book.
I made a literal translation of the hymns from Latin, as the previous version was more focused on musical qualities (also included).
I also found (ok was sent by someone hoping I would do something with them) a few versions of the music for the hymns arranged as three-part melodies. I have never heard any of these sung. I am hoping that putting them together and getting them reprinted in this book might prompt others to try and sing them. Oh, and I typeset the gregorian chant using Gregorio.
The document was put together with LaTeX, a software system that uses a structured markup system with a heavy dose of macros. LaTeX is fantastic. It makes me almost want to cry when I see something done in MS Word. But maybe that is me being a little OCD. I want consistency in how everything is formatted in a document: heading style, font and font size used etc. For Word, you have to try to get it right. With LaTeX, you have to try to get it wrong.

Here is the result, if anyone wants to look at it. Or you can have a look at a few of the interesting pages in the images below.

Novena to St. Paul the First Hermit, in both the English and the Latin