There are new designs coming to the website in just a few short hours! I am so excited to share them with you!

I’m going to be honest, I really struggled to find an overarching collection theme for these stoles. The more I pushed, though, the less it felt like it was genuinely representative of the process that had brought these designs to fruition.

So I let my need for a Collection Theme go, and what emerged instead was a natural dissemination of these designs into already-existing collections. Many of them naturally correlated with patron saints I’d already researched, so watch for the newly represented patron saints in the new designs.

I felt like there was a lot of coloring outside the lines during this collection’s creation. For instance, I was inspired by the church calendar with the Kairos stole — the ways Easter both holds and imbues meaning into all the other seasons of the church calendar. That made me think of light and how light holds all the colors in the spectrum. So the Kairos stole, an Easter-white stole, also contains small dashes of all the liturgical season colors. And you’ll have to forgive my nerdiness for a moment — but yes, I did fit each of those colorful segments into precise 7-inch-wide bands. There is a long tradition in Judeo-Christianity of layering meaning with numbers and amounts, so I figure it’s fair game. :)

Another “coloring outside the lines” theme that I was inspired by is the interplay between Lent and Easter. Sometimes I’ve had a tendency to think of Lent and Easter in a starkly dark vs. light way. I’m being overly simplistic with those designations, but maybe you’ve experienced this to some degree as well? Anyhow, I’ve just been dwelling a lot lately on the interplay between these seasons. They’re twin seasons, joined together by an ongoing narrative arch that doesn’t fully develop without the other.

For what would be the motivation to dislodge ourselves from focusing solely on the reality of death if not for the evidence of life and love being the ultimate conquerors? And where would we be without the mystery of hope that seems to only bloom into life from the depths of the grave? It seems to me that beyond just being neighbors, the seasons of Lent and Easter actually develop one another into ways they would lack without each other. And to take it a step further, I wonder how we are developed as we delve into Lent while holding Easter at bay in our hearts, and how we are electrified in Easter while holding the solemnity of Lent so near in our experiences.

Anyhow, I’m not intending this to be a theological treatise — I’m more just sharing some of the wanderings of my heart and head lately. I’m still trying to get language around it all, to be frank, so let me know how this strikes you. I’d love to hear what you think.

All to say — these heart / head wanderings impacted the development of the Lent and Easter stole designs. I found little ways of putting a little bit of Easter brilliance into the Lent stoles, and sneaking a bit of Lenten purple into the Easter stoles.

I’m so very excited to share these designs with you all. If you have a moment, drop me a note to let me know which ones connect with you and where your head and heart have been these days as we prepare to enter Lent together.

Grateful to be on this journey of life together,

Andrea

P.S. Thank you so much to Patricia for writing to ask if I could create audio versions of these blog posts for anyone with vision-impairments. I will be doing so this next week and hope to get some recordings up shortly!