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:
