Overview
Medium: Brass plated sun charms; glass beads, faux-gold necklace chain, faux-gold wire
Technique: Metal shaping; wire wrapping; chain jewelry construction
Completed: March 2025
Created For: Self
A secondary version of the collar, using alternating antique brass and gold colored charms
Notes
Continuing my trend of making fancier and fancier garb and accessories, I decided to take a step up from the thin necklaces & sun charms on a chain that I began with, and made not one but two full-circle livery collars based off of my device.
The suns are the same charms I make my personal tokens from. I clipped off and filed the ring, then drilled a 3/64″ hole in each of the 8 points to use for mounting.
I ended upgoing through about 5 different iterations for assembly before coming up with something that I felt looked good, laid flat, and was quick to untangle if it got twisted over itself. Most of these iterations were working out where the beads would be positioned.
What I landed on was for the beads to be secured in a simple wire loop fixture and suspended beneath pairs of suns. The beads are held in a simple wire-loop fitting I made myself.
There is just enough slack that they don’t affect the way the collar lays, but are still tight enough that it will stop the links from flipping completely over when lifted, effectively making it tangle-proof.
*PHOTO, CLOSE-UP*
Normally for a project like this I would have used Jump Rings to attach the findings together, but as I needed hundreds of them and the Joanne’s in my town was going out of business, I instead opted to use individual links taken from necklace chain for the attachment points, and used a jeweler’s mandrel to wrap my own large jump rings for the central links.
The main way this type of collar is meant to be worn is draped over the shoulders, approximately evenly distributed in the front and back. In period, these collars were heavy enough their own weight kept them in more or less the same position on the wearer. This being a rather light collar, it has a tendency to slide around when walking around with it on (especially with how at every SCA event it’s more likely than not I’ll be dashing somewhere at some point during the day).
I have incorporated two elements to keep the collar in place while it is worn. First, there is a thin necklace chain running through the middle, that acts as a sort of “middle-stop” to stop it from sliding forward.
Second, there are two small lobster clasps attached to the suns at the midpoints of the circle’s circumference, which can be clipped to a safety pin or similar mounting point on a piece of garb, which prevents it from sliding forward, but more importantly stops it from shifting inwards towards the neck
Angist Arts 