Smocking is the art of embroidering over pleats, to form a pretty and stretchy gathered fabric. Lovely on baby clothes, smocking also features heavily in this season’s Anthropologie collection, and today we’ll be learning 2 smocking stitches – outline stitch and trellis stitch – to make over a mans t-shirt into a heavily embellished tank top inspired by ‘Attic Treasures‘.
You’ll need:
- A T-shirt a couple of sizes too big (mine was from the 100-yen shop)
- Chiffon or muslin scarf or handkerchief (again, from the 100-yen shop!) – if you’d like ‘roses’ in different shades, you could get a couple.
- Ribbon scraps – 15-20cm of wide ribbon, you’ll need 2 or 3
- Smocking dots, or dressmakers pencil and ruler
- Embroidery thread
- needle and thread to match fabric
- scissors
Start by cutting off the sleeves of the T-shirt, just inside the seam. Cut a square wide neckline. You can bind or hem the back of the neckline and the armholes if you wish, but I left the edges raw.
The first step in smocking is gathering the fabric. Turn your T-shirt inside out, and choose which side will be the front. Iron on 2-3 lines of smocking dots around 2cm below the neckline, or use a ruler and dressmaking pencil to mark rows of evenly-spaced dots, about 1cm apart. As well as being in a straight line horizontally, make sure your dots line up vertically as well.
Knot the end of a thread, and stitch along each row of dots, picking up a few threads of the fabric at each dot. Draw the threads tight to gather the fabric, and tie the ends of the threads together. Make the gathered area 2 or 3 inches narrower than it needs to be, as your finished smocking will stretch out.
Turn the fabric over, and thread a needle with embroidery thread. As with most smocking designs, we’re going to start with a row of outline stitch. We’ll work from left to right. Bring the needle up to the left of the leftmost pleat. Make a stitch into the peak of the pleat from right to left, inserting the needle at a slight downward angle and keeping the thread above the needle. Stitch into the next pleat to the right in the same way, and work across stitching into every pleat.
Next we’ll work a row of trellis stitch. Trellis stitch is usually worked in multiples of two rows, making a diamond pattern. Thread your needle, and bring it up in the leftmost pleat, on the upper of your gathering threads. Keeping the thread above the needle, stitch into the next pleat from right to left. In the next pleat, make a stitch in the same way, but a little lower down. Keep stitching lower each stitch until you have stitched 4 pleats. For the fifth stitch, move the thread so it is below the needle, and work the next four stitches moving upward a little with each pleat. Move the thread so it comes over the needle for the 5th and uppermost stitch, and repeat the whole pattern from the beginning. Work across, stitching into every pleat from right-to-left, and keeping the thread above the needle as you work downward, and below the needle when you are working upward.
T-shirt fabric, being stretchy, is perhaps not the easiest fabric for smocking, so don’t be too despondent if your stitches aren’t perfectly neat. When you’ve worked both rows, pull out the gathering threads.
Cut a strip from the hem of the scarf or handkerchief and stitch it to the inside of the neckline, behind the smocking, so the edge is around 1cm higher than the edge of the t-shirt fabric.
Make ‘roses’ by cutting circles from the remainder of the scarf and folding them into 6. Make small ribbon ruffles by gathering a scrap of ribbon into pleats and backstitching along the middle. Use this kanzashi tutorial to make fabric flowers from the sleeves of the t-shirt, and/or make flowers of stacked circles of fabric.
Arrange your flowers, ruffles and roses around the neckline, and sew in place. Finished!
Smocking is particularly nice on childrens clothes, or on summer dresses and tops.
