The Buffer Collar

This collar started life as a plain velvet base like this one:

The idea behind this one is to provide a collar to protect the vulnerable throat, which I have written about in previous blogs.  I decided to cover the throat in soft, silk pom-poms in jewel-pastel colours.  To stop it becoming too cutesy I made some very uneven ones.

I made the pom-poms on a device I bought at the Festival of Quilts this year.  It is basically a frame which you wrap wool round.  The reason I bought it, apart from the fact that I love pom-poms is the mother and daughter team who were selling them.  The mother had designed it and the daughter was selling the kits.  The mother gave us the usual it’s really easy and you can do hundreds of things with it, but the daughter was a real star.  She was clearly so proud of her mother that it was infectious, and she ran us through the range of options to buy as though she was selling us the elixir of life.  It was performance art as much as a sales pitch and I was very happy to hand over my £12 for what is basically a bent wire coathanger just for the joy of watching the act.

As it turns out, starting with slippery pure silk yarn is not the best way to make pom-poms, and even with acrylic knitting wool it is hard to get the knots tight enough in the middle so that the pom-poms stay together and have a good shape, but the collar as a whole is rather nice with its slightly deranged bobbles, and could be worn with a fairly plain jumper:

The Athena Collar

For some reason, the photographs on the blog are getter worse.  I still can’t find my proper close-up camera for the details, and I like to use my camera phone so that the pictures will load quickly when you read the blog, but I seem to be losing my touch with the shots.  Anyway, to Athena.

This collar started life as one of the velvet blanks – beautiful cotton velvet used in soft furnishings and donated by the son of a friend of my mother who has had honourable mentions in these despatches before.  I started to stitch on the flat circular beads which I bought on a trip to Copenhagen with the Medieval Historian and which therefore have sentimental value:

I was lucky to have some matching cube beads to stitch around the edges.  I covered the velvet with the beads and then lost a bit of momentum.  I was driving to our huge out of town shopping mall, so not thinking about the collars or the project at all, when I suddenly thought that of all of the collars, this one looked the most like plate armour of a sort with its overlapping deflecting discs, which is where the project started.  Then I remembered a necklace I had bought in a closing down sale which was unwearable, but which had masses of owl charms.  I bought it because my mother loves owls and I thought she might be able to use some of them in her work.  I couldn’t have bought the owl charms in that number for the price of the necklace, so it was a bargain lying dormant in the bead drawer.  Surprisingly, I managed to find it (no small feat) and then set to it with my pliers.  I stitched owls around the bottom and used the chain to make the strap for the finished collar.

Then when I was at the Hobbycraft sale, I found the two black plastic coral amulets:

I really wanted to include them, even though I know they look odd.

The armour-like feel of the piece, and the owls make me think about Athena, a goddess I have always felt some sort of affinity with.

In the first of these photographs you can see her owl, the bird she is associated with.  One of my favourite Klimt paintings is of Athena, and you can see a form of the overlapping disc effect that I was going for:

I feel my affinity to her because she is associated with craft and textiles in particular – the story of Arachne being turned into a spider is part of the Athena myth.  She is also a goddess of war and wisdom.  But my affinity comes from her being a helpmeet of the boys in battle, and her close association with her father – she sprang fully formed and fully armed from her father’s head.  I am very strongly drawn to male mental energy, and the world of the head.  I don’t think we would get on if we ever met because we are too similar.   I am that rare breed: a life-long committed feminist who would rather have been born a man!

The coral, to conclude, is an amulet that I saw a lot when I was in Naples a couple of years ago.  I know that Naples is in Italy and Athena was Greek, but it seemed to fit my classical Graeco-Roman theme.

The Femme Fatale Collar

The title of this one is pretty self-explanatory.  I was in two minds whether to include a collar like this.  The whole topic of sexuality at work is a tricky one.  There is no doubt that some women do use their sexuality as a way of advancing their careers, and that the double standard still applies.  There are male womanisers in my profession, of course, and people smile and wink.  Women who do it, on the other hand, are often viewed with some distaste and even a tinge of pity.  There is also a very strong argument that women’s sexuality has always been strictly policed and controlled, and this just continues into the workplace, a method of social control that should be challenged.  So, it is a contentious area, and a difficult one to work with, but one which has to be included in any serious discuss of women’s clothing at work.

This collar is a bit of a cheat as I bought the neckpiece and then stitched some feather trim around the edge.  I had forgotten the hazards of using this kind of elaborate edging, which is that they can often have a prodigious amount of glue keeping them together which quickly transfers to the needle.  I had to throw two away because they were so gunged up by the end.  The idea is a bit of a cheat too, as I saw it in Cloth magazine ages ago and had a yen to make one.

I think that this one would be wearable in the evening.  My inspiration comes from Mata Hari and all the jewellery and accessories of the Roaring Twenties:

I think I bought the centrepiece in Liberty:

All this is reminding me that I bought a bargain copy of the recent version of The Great Gatsby and that I should sit down and watch it, if only for the costumes.

 

War Collar 4: The Blood Collar

 

This is the first collar I made.  I started by thinking that the throat was a vulnerable part of the body with so much blood so near the surface and made the collar in blood red tones.  As I have done more work on the whole area of amulets I have learned that there is an element in many of them of confusing evil spirits or deflecting their attention and getting them to pass on.  So, in a world of violence already being smeared with blood might mean that the aggressor will move on and leave you alone.

That’s the serious stuff.  The lighter stuff is that I love working with red.  It is a richly symbolic colour about danger, blood, sex, sin and so on, but also celebration and life.  I find it an energising and life-enhancing colour.  I also learned early on from studying Kaffe Fassett and his work that to work well with red you need to include lots of shades of it.  They seem to hum together and to vibrate.  Fassett often throws in a bit of lime with his red or turquoise blue, which I didn’t do with this piece.

 

I calmed it down a bit with some gentle beige:

These little rolled beads are made from some mock suede (another luxury furnishing fabric provided by my mother’s friend’s son) printed with transfer paint and then wrapped with some beads.

There is also some crimson furnishing velvet and little rosettes of thread.

The centrepiece is a big felt flower which I made but never used for a Christmas wreath.  The cord is a simple plait of the fabrics used in the piece.