Making the “Neckpiece for a Golden Age”

The Devon guild of Craftsmen summer show in 2012 had the title “Reaching For Gold” and Wai-Yuk wanted to produce a piece of work that would both stretch her technical abilities and avoid any obvious Olympic references. She set out to make a large neckpiece that would be more complex than she had ever attempted before and decided to take China’s “golden age” as her inspiration.

First Wai-Yuk came up with colour ideas and began experimenting with possible base materials.

She eventually decided on a whitish main base fabric that stronger colours would contrast with.

Initial ideas for the design were worked out in a series of sketches.

Wai-Yuk wished to include the traditional Chinese “cloud” motif in the design.

This close-up of the drawing shows elements inspired by traditional Chinese “cloud” motifs.

The first stage of making was to create a brooch to check out how the colours worked.

Normally Wai-Yuk would start working on the finished design right away but because this was to be more complex than anything she had made using this technique before, she began with a test piece.

Further parts were added to the prototype and different combinations were tried.

Eventually, the test forms developed a life of their own. Wai-Yuk intends to use them as decoration on a waistcoat she plans to make.

Finally, Wai-Yuk was ready to move on to making the neckpiece. She began by cutting parts out of the chosen base material.

Completion of the neckpiece can be seen in Part 2