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Sewing with Texture Session 5: Traditional Smocking

National Sewing Circle Editors
Duration:   11  mins

Description

In this session you will learn how to smock fabric in a traditional honeycomb pattern. Ashley demonstrates a smocking method that allows you to make all markings on the wrong side of the fabric while stitching on the right side.

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Smocking is another really fun texture technique that adds a little bit of elasticity to fabric. So, if in the previous section the shearing wasn't working for you, you wanted to try something that looked... add sort of an older feel to it. Shearing, or I'm sorry. Smocking is something you can do for that.

And so all we're doing with this is making a bunch of sort of pleats. Sewing in them in different ways and it's creating... this is called a honeycomb pattern but it still has some stretch to it. And I'll show you how to prep the fabric in just a minute. But how far apart you draw your lines and how far apart we are going to stitch on our smocking decides for one how gathered it's gonna look, how deep the smocking is going to go and how stretchy it is.

So these were done at 1/2 inch, and you see it has a lot of stretch to it. This is the same size square, but done in an inch. And you can see there's still some stretch but I mean, these are really, really big honeycombs. They're very deep. So there's going to be a lot of fullness to this on whatever you use it in, but it still has the same look.

So I'm going to show you how to do it at 3/4 of an inch. So you can see all of them. We have 1/2, we'll do 3/4, and this is an inch. So we have our square of fabric or whatever it is you're going to do this on whether this is, you know maybe the top of a dress, if you want it to add some decoration down a sleeve into a gathered sort of plume make something that looks really old fashioned that might be kind of cool. But so whatever you're working on, you wanna start with the wrong side of your fabric up.

We're gonna draw some lines along the wrong side. There's a few different ways you can do smocking. This is the way that I like to do smocking because I like to draw all of my lines on the wrong side of my fabric, that way you never see them. That way if something accidentally doesn't come out, you use the wrong pen or something, it's not going to ruin your work. So I'm just going to draw a line to start with.

It's going to be my starting line. Now, what I need to do is I need to make marks every 3/4 of an inch this way, and also 3/4 of an inch this way. So I'm essentially creating a grid of 3/4 inch squares. Now I can either do that by laying this down and drawing lines this way and then lines this way or I can go in and make marks. So if this is where I'm starting, we'll start right over here four, this is where it is on my ruler.

And I can make marks like this every three quarter of an inch and go along. But if that's too hard for you to count or you just think it'll take too long, then you can just draw your lines every 3/4 of an inch this way. All the way down. And then we turn around and go this way, again, giving ourselves a starting line and then 3/4 of an inch here, move it over again, 3/4 of an inch. And we're gonna have this grid on the back.

And what we're concerned about is our intersection lines along this grid. So we'll go a little further, get a good idea what this is gonna look like. And you would do this along the back of the entire area that you want smocked. Okay. So, This...

we'll call this just our small section we're gonna work with here. So what I'm concerned with are these areas right here, all of our little intersection lines, because this is where I'm going to be doing the biggest running stitch you'll probably do in anything. And what I mean by that is I am going to take my needle go down at this intersection point, come up at this one, pull it through like so, I have a knot in the end it's not gonna go anywhere. And I'm going to do that all the way across. Down at this one, up at the next one.

Down at this one, up at this one, you see as a running stitch, I can just keep going. I can load as many onto my needle as possible until I go all the way across. So I go down, go up. This' my last intersection point so, I will be ending down. And it doesn't matter whether you are starting up and ending down, you don't have to have an even number, an odd number or anything like that.

That part doesn't matter. What does matter, I'll clip that off so I can start the next row, is that if my knot is here on this one, meaning I'm starting on the backside, going down first with my stitches, i need to continue with that same thing. So ,again all I will do is start my next row. I tied another knot, We will go down with this one, up at this one, down, up and continue all the way along this. And you're going to continue this all the way along.

Every one that you've done, until it looks like this. So you can see, I have all of my lines drawn. I've gone back and I've just made small marks at my 3/4 of an inch. You can do that too. But again, I've gone down and up same way all the way across.

And I have left some thread tails here at the end. Now, what I wanna do, is I wanna gather these. I'm gonna pull on these pieces of thread, until everything comes together. So, if you can sort of lay it down and grab onto all of them at once, that's great. If you have to keep going back up and down, you can do that too, but you want to pull them all tight like this and this last one at the end never quite gets as tight as the rest of them but, that's okay.

Okay. And, so you need your piece to look like this. This is the wrong side. We're going to flip it over, and we're going to begin doing our stitches. It's gonna hold our smocking in place and create our honeycomb pattern.

So, when you have it sitting here in front of you like this, I want you to think that this is column one, or you call them little mountains, one, two, three, four, five and then this one over here that isn't quite gathered in completes the bottom of five. But so we have five. So what you're gonna be doing is bringing together every one in alternating rows. So what I mean by that is, right here is where my first line of stitching is. Right.

So I wanna bring my needle up from underneath. Right. You can see right where my stitching is. I'm really close to where that's at right there. Bring my needle up.

And I'm gonna sew together, little mountains one and two. And you can do that by just doing a whip stitch. I like to go ahead and do a little knot. I want to make sure that this is going to stay especially if this is something I wanna use in a garment, I don't want this coming out. Let me stitch together one and two.

I'm gonna put my needle to the back. I want it to just come out somewhere in the back. I'm not really concerned where. Pull it through and I'm ready to move on. Now, to stitch together one and two, I need to stitch together three and four.

Again, I wanna make sure that everything stays tight. But what I wanna do, is make sure that I have enough Slack between the two knots of stitching that I'm doing that when I have my finished product and I'm stretching it, that there is no thread in the back that's holding it. So, to do that, pick up my needle if I can, like this. Go back up from the bottom, bringing my needle out in the mountain number three right by where my gathering thread is, and now I'm going to pull it apart like this because this is the maximum amount of stretch that it'll be able to get even in this smocking design. And then I'm going to pull my thread up.

Now I'm not pulling my thread tight, I'm waiting until I feel it hit the end right there. That means my thread tail here on the back is this long which means, even if this smocking gets pulled to its max, it's not gonna break the thread behind it. And I'm gonna do the same thing right where I'm gonna stitch these two guys together. Can... I like to do little knots.

And I like to do two of them. Now, if you wanted your stitching to also be a decorative element, you could be using a bright colored thread and you could do three, four, five knots if you really wanted a big little dot of color here. Again I'm gonna pull it to the back. Like, so, and now this row is done because I only have one left over here. Now I need to move on to my next row.

And this is where I said we're going to stitch them together in alternating patterns. So if I did one and two, three and four on this one, the next one I'm going to separate and go five and four, three and two like this. And you'll see how this is gonna start creating our honeycomb pattern. So I'm gonna go ahead and pinch those and hold it. Again, bring my needle up from behind leaving Slack in it again because I don't want my thread to break at all when it gets pulled tight.

So I'm not pulling tight, I'm just waiting until I barely feel my thread hit the end. And then I can. So these two together. And I'll do my two knots. That's one Here's two, just like that.

Bring it back down to the back of the fabric. Like so, and then we'll stitch our next two together. So now it's numbers two and tree that are gonna get pulled together. So bring it up from the back, like so, pulling until I just feel it touch the end of the thread like that. And then go ahead and make my two little knots.

This' one... Here's two , just like that. And I would continue on. So as you can see how by going every... alternating every other row...

So on the next one, I'll be stitching here and here. I'm creating that honeycomb design by simply alternating where I'm putting those stitches. So again, I can bring our finished one in, and you can see how, again, I alternated every other row just doing those little knots all across the top and have a really fun smock pattern. This is a piece of fabric that now has some stretch to it and that can easily be incorporated to a garment or any other project you want to put it in. So give this a try.

It's really, really fun and easy and really quite relaxing to do. So, definitely give it a try.

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