Canadian Smocking, An Answer to A Desire For Texture?

Some Skirt Draping

A great realization has hit me. I LOVE textures in fabric. Softness. Different shapes. It's captivating when a garment has different textures that lead the eye in different directions. I found a book on fabric manipulation not too long ago on one of my jaunts to New York. Draping was the first technique I had my eye on. Both dresses for this post have a draped skirt. I drafted a pattern for a basic pencil skirt block and then slashed it to get this draped pattern.

I learned that it matters where you put the slashes and how large you make them. Smaller ones gave the skirt a rather gathered appearance like the dress following this one. The larger ones gave me the broader draping I wanted. I loved the way this skirt fell. Even though it was made from a pencil pattern, I used it as the top for a mermaid skirt on the yellow dress below and an A-Line skirt for the second dress. Both came out lovely in the end.

Canadian Smocking

One experiment done. That propelled me into my next fabric manipulation experiment. This time it was Canadian smocking. What's that you say? Smocking is a form of fabric manipulation in which you make stitches on certain places of fabric, to gather the fabric together. This creates a beautiful 3 dimensional pattern. There are various patterns to achieve different designs. This was the initial one that I chose. Below you can see the grid pattern and how to stitch it.

Overall, smocking is very easy, albeit a bit time consuming if you have large amounts of fabric to smock. It took me about 3 days to smock my two yards (1.8m) of fabric. But that's only because of making several mistakes and redoing it over again. Somehow I couldn't figure out how to get this one even though I followed the directions to the letter. I ended up doing a bone pattern by happenstance (the one in the very first image) and decided to just go with it.

I took this piece of smocked fabric and decided to use it as the bodice. I was going for a lovely off-the-shoulder drape. The idea was that this dress was supposed to mimic water in some way. So the bodice was supposed to be this wave pattern leading down to the draped skirt. I got close, with my bone smocking. Overall I was pleased at least with the different textures that were contrasting with the skirt and the bodice. I decided to do a slit on this dress as well, and to actually finish the edges for once with this lovely folded over fabric. Since this was my third time using this fabric, I already knew and wanted to avoid the nightmare of rolled hems or even straight stitching it.

I think this has been my favorite of all my experiments so far and the culmination of all the blue fabric that I compulsively bought. I'm gonna try to change gears and use the other colors I love a little bit more. It's just that blue is so fascinating! Anyhow...

The question: is Canadian smocking the answer to my desire to satiate my sensual nature via fabric? Honestly I have not decided yet. Most definitely this will not be the end of my adventure with this texture application.