I'm amazed at how cheap those altar tablecloths are. I was once asked to help out a church (not mine) with producing such a cloth. They were 'clients from hell'. Someone in the congregation had left them money in her will to buy a new cloth, but they decided it was wicked to spend so much money on it when the money could be used for charitable purposes, so the congregation would make one instead.
But it couldn't be made out of any old rubbish, it had to be the right fabric, bought from an ecclesiastical supply place like this one. According to the Lady Who Had the Catalogue in those pre-internet days, that made it about as expensive as a ready-embroidered one. I never saw the figures, but it seemed depressingly pointless & the group couldn't agree on anything. The only thing we eventually agreed on was that it would be blue.
The next thing I was told was that the church leader declared that it would NOT be blue, so we were back to square one. He called a meeting about it & then cancelled the meeting at the last minute, & at that point I gave up.
The only worse religious cloth thing I've been involved with was a chuppah for a Jewish wedding (I'm still not Jewish), which those processional canopies reminded me of. The bride & groom told me they loved my textile work & wanted something just like it. So I gave them a date by which I had to have their design so that I'd have time to make it. That date came & went, & much too late, they gave me a design which was nothing like the work I did. I had no idea how to make it. Every time I came up with a possible method/product to use, they vetoed it - sometimes I'd even bought supplies & made samples. I gave up on it after they told me (again much too late) that the fabric couldn't be seamed but had to be in one piece - I sourced a fabric & was then told no, it could only be a specific type of fibre, which mine wasn't. I think they bought something ready-made in the end. I wish they'd done that in the beginning & spared me months of anxiety, because I loved the idea & would've been honoured to work on it, & felt guilty about letting them down.
People are a pain, & never accept commissions. Those are the lessons I took from those & other projects - even when the customer was happy, they'd always have thrown in odd demands which gave trouble, or not told me vital things, even if I asked about them. I thought I'd cracked it when I worked in a different medium & had framed images in an exhibition so people could just buy them straight off the wall - & someone asked me to change the frame colour of her chosen image!