Scarf Mania
The magic suitcase!Nearly a half-year has gone past! How have I done with my New Year’s resolutions? Well, I passed resolution one with flying colours: I did not get sunburned. My second resolution had all to do with wearing scarves.
I know this sounds extremely frivolous and ridiculous, but the fact is I love scarves and shawls and have such an enormous collection. Many of them are vintage – and I so rarely wear them. Though I already own more than enough for three of me, I keep buying more whenever I stumble across one I find irresistible – especially when it’s some lovely scrap of coloured silk, or a square of cashmere, or Scottish angora plaid. I’m a moth to a flame.
My problem is twofold: I am always in a hurry in the morning to get ready for work. When I think accessories, they are not the first items that come to mind – they are a non-essential extra. Choosing a scarf and knotting it properly always takes extra time that I can’t spare.
These vintage square silk scarves both feature square motifs.The other problem lies in that old adage, ‘out of sight, out of mind’. I do have a scarf rack – one of those nifty contraptions bought in Ikea: a vertical hanging rack of circles that are crocheted together. You thread the scarves through the loops. It hangs on a wall in my closet, a convenient display, but the trouble is that the circles are too large to thread small square scarves onto them (they would slip out), and so all these are stored away in a vintage suitcase, along with a number of large shawls that I would simply not thread on the scarf rack at all.
That’s a New Year’s Resolution FAIL!
So exactly how many times during the summer did I wear a scarf? Exactly once. Uh-huh. And I made a special effort to achieve that! That’s a New Year’s Resolution FAIL!
A silk shawl I have actually worn – victory! This is a vintage 1920s navy piano shawl (bought on Etsy a couple of years ago), thickly embroidered in white and featuring a deep knotted fringe. It's so huge it would trail on the ground if I draped it around me like a cloak. I saw a 1920s film a while back (the name of which I can't recall) and the lead actress flung her shawl around her shoulders exactly like that.I am doing better during the winter, because scarves of course are a necessary extra layer of warmth on a chilly day, and these long winter scarves are too fat for complicated knots – I usually wrap them across my chest under my coat, or loop them around my neck over the top of my outerwear.
So what is the answer to this sartorial dilemma? I know what it is: I have simply got to get up earlier. I ought to have made that my first New Year’s Resolution!