Here are some pics of a couple of neck-warmers I had ordered from me recently - the blue one from my stock and the orange and green as a commissioned piece. Perhaps not the season for wool around your neck - but good Christmas presents nonetheless.
Having little button-up neck-warmers appeals to me a lot personally as I tend to get a cold neck in winter but my general poor co-ordination makes a long scarf hanging down around my neck just one more hazard to negotiate. I started exploring button-up scarf creations a few months ago, and it's fun.
The blue scarf on the left is called "Industrial Children", and it's part of my Granny Punk range. I've enjoyed exploring a punk aesthetic, making use of both "pretty" things like lace and flowers together with skull beads, safety pins, and bits of junk like aluminium ring-pulls. I've tried to bring the punk aesthetic into conversation with my own aesthetic, which is substantially earthy. To some degree, a punk aesthetic involves re-appropriation of industrial objects not designed to be decorative, reinvesting them with new meanings - e.g. the safety pin (sociologists and pop culture theorists like to call this
bricolage - a concept Michel de Certeau talks about in his book
The Practice of Everyday Life).
As a would-be critic of industrial society, this renegade reclamation of industrial wares appeals to me. I like that industrial junk can be re-appropriated as beauty - there is a sense of resistance in that. My own hope is that we can move even further - not only re-appropriating as our own the pre-determined products of an industrial economy, but beginning to shape for ourselves the very forms of the things we produce. Incorporating junk bits into a handmade, earthy scarf is something of that to me - combining the creative abilities needed to make use - and beauty - of what we already have, with the visionary creativity needed to move toward something altogether different. I guess that's what "Industrial Children" is about - my hope for my own generation to re-imagine that which we already have and which has grown stale in our hands, and to prophetically imagine a future which is altogether different.
I'm happy she's found an owner! Here's another picture:
You can find the pattern for this collar at The Ongoing Project blog - have a look at the beautiful deep pink they've used there. It's a nice one. I've worked mine in a thicker cotton than they recommend - Bendigo Woollen Mills 8ply cotton, creating a chunkier version. I've also used the pointed-edge variation of the pattern. I'm planning to design one of my own soon - probably with varying sizes of points/scallops.
The second piece, you'll be relieved to hear, is invested with no meaning so profound. It's called "As Chance Would Have It", and it's about...green, and orange, and bright buttons, and I hope it's going make to make someone smile. To make up for the lack of profundity, I'll just swamp you with pictures:
x Granny Funk