Liturgical Arts for St. Antony's

Last week the Liturgical Arts team met to brainstorm how we might dress our worship space during Easter. Caroline gave us a very interesting report of her visit to the Diocesan Altar Guild meeting at the Cathedral the previous week.

The former head of the Diocesan Altar Guild looked at the photos of our worship space that Caroline provided and made a number of enlightening comments:

• We have lots of room to work with
• Our present hangings are too far apart and they pull the focus away from the altar area which should be the main focus
• The visual weight of our present arrangement is low (In other words, we don't have much to pull the eye upward) so everything we do should pull the eye up
• We should try to pull the focus into the altar area
• Possibly we could paint the wall behind the altar to provide a visual frame (possible using a sand color - not blue because we have too much blue coming in the windows)
• Possibly we could have two hangings, one on either side of the cross, which could be uneven in height (one higher and one lower)
• A dossal hanging might be a good way to frame the cross and altar area and to pull the eye up

I thought a dossal was an ingenious idea. A dossal is a wide hanging behind the altar area, often of a rich fabric such as a tapestry. We agreed that a hanging like that would be a good idea for our altar area.

A huge dossal that appears in the Almy catalog

Caroline brought a piece of some fabric that the Diocesan Altar Guild has available. It's a rich tapestry with flowers, and there's a larger piece we could use that would serve as a dossal. Caroline will pick up the fabric when she goes to Seattle next, and we'll meet again February 21 to see how it looks, and whether we need to line it or add fringe to it.

We also discussed using different colored dossals for different seasons of the church year, and we discussed whether we could use a frontal for the altar.

All in all, it was a fruitful meeting with some very creative ideas and plans.