I made this collar because I wanted to say something about the need women have to look out for themselves, because despite Equal Pay acts they are often paid less than men doing equal work of equal value. And the things that are offered to women are often of a much lower political currency than those offered to men. So women get to be head of HRM but not Finance, or Strategy, or IT. We have to learn to resist those blandishments, or at least be quite clear about which currency we are being paid in.
I wanted to use the discs along the bottom which I think might actually be old French coins with holes drilled in them, and the piece was based around this, and the idea of using trading beads as currency. The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford has some great examples of trading beads and I have always been a bit drawn to them.
Sample card of trading beads
I started with a nice piece of silk which I quilted onto some thin cotton wadding:
I used the Madeira lana thread to get a good textural contrast.
I started to sew the ‘feature’ beads on:
And it very soon became apparent that this was going to be one of those projects I call ‘Make it Work’ after Tim Gunn turning his nose up at potential disasters in Project Runway. This one was going to need considerable work to make it look like anything at all. I had a bag of what looked almost like Roman glass beads which the magnificent Tanya Bentham had given to me, and I supplemented the feature beads with those. The piece began to come alive, but it was obvkous that it needed to be encrusted with beads to work. I had a big bag of black glass beads and I think that adding black often gives a tribal feel to things which is what I wanted so I stitched them on to fill in the gaps:
Then I added the coins which were my starting point. The two outside edge medallions are there for personal reasons. They are the Chinese horoscope signs of me and the Medieval Historian.
I finished the piece with some chain that I found in Hobbycraft.
This piece was a real surprise to me. I didn’t want to abandon it because I had had the big feature beads forever and had been saving them for something special, so I ploughed on with it, but in the end I really, really like the result. It’s a bit chunky to wear, but with the right dress….
