Guest Post by Margy Hood: Lessons Learned

Guest Post By Margy Hood. Her work has been featured in several issues of Sew Beautiful magazine. Find her on Instagram @margyhood

Over time I’ve learned that the more effort put into planning and prepping a project, the less likely I have to “un-sew” (aka: use my seam-ripper), and the more enjoyable sewing is. I learned a lot on my last project, and want to thank @DressThemDearly for allowing me to guest-blog and share both the successes and failures of that project with you.

A friend recently called and asked if I could make a birthday dress for her daughter, Mary Charlotte. What she envisioned was Mary Charlotte…smocked on a Lee…using Ellen McCarn’s Balloons smocking plate…on gingham. I said, “Sure, I can do that!” (My standard answer to any sewing challenge). And then, as always, reality set in. So, with fabric, smocking plate and pattern in-hand, I sat down with a cup of coffee and hatched my plan.

Kerry (five letters) was the name featured on the plate, and I had a hunch that fitting Charlotte (nine letters) in the same space might be a challenge. The average amount of pleats in a 45-inch width of fabric is somewhere around 180. The smocking plate, as published, covered 180 pleats. However, in order to spell out Charlotte and still have room for the balloons, at least 200 pleats would be needed. I arrived at this number by adding the number of pleats each letter covered plus two pleats for the spaces between letters. In this case, the total was 112 pleats. Then, I added pleats for the balloons, and that brought me really close to the 180-pleat mark. Had this been an insert, it would have been fine. But, for this dress, the smocking would be on the skirt, and armholes would have to be considered. So, I added 20 more pleats to accommodate them.

The total equaled 200-ish pleats, or 20 more pleats than I could expect to get out of the 45 inches that the pattern allowed for the skirt.

To figure how much fabric I needed to add, I counted 20 pleats on an un-smocked insert and then flattened out that section to measure it. It was 5 inches in length. This meant that my skirt needed to be 50 inches wide X the length. (To make it extra twirly, I added the five inches to both the front and back.) If you are using the pattern pieces for the skirt, you would move them 2.5 inches from the fold. Luckily, it was a Fabric Finders gingham, so it was 60 inches wide! A-45-inch-wide fabric would not have worked for this dress.

Now, onto the pleating portion. Gingham can be very tricky to pleat. If the fabric is not perfectly on-grain and rolled perfectly straight through the pleater, you will end up with a wavy effect. And, if you do get it pleated straight, it can look like stripes. In this case, it would have been one pink stripe, and one white stipe. If I had been smocking a geometric design, this would have been fine. But for this dress, my goal was to create as much solid color on which to smock as I could. I decided that the only way to do this would be to hand-pleat. (This, by the way, would be the first time I had ever hand-pleated.)

My plan was to use the white squares as my “pick-up point,” hoping that, by doing this, the white would be pulled into the valley of the pleat, and I would end up with an all-pink look. And, ta-da, it actually worked! I was really pleased with the results, and pleasantly surprised that pleating by hand was actually not bad at all.

Feeling confident at this point, I counted my pleats, marked my center, and was ready to smock! After smocking my borders and completing all the back-smocking, it was time to smock “Mary Charlotte.”

I began with the L and moved out to the right, completing LOTTE. Then came the R, the A and the H. Just as I finished the H and was admiring my work, thinking how well things were going, it was suddenly obvious that there was a problem: Because of the way the letters go up and down, Mary could not be centered above Charlotte. (I don’t know some of y’all personally, so my comments made at this moment probably should not be repeated.) Even with careful planning, sometimes things just don’t go according to plan!

The only way to make this work was to take out HARLOTTE and smock the letters a straight row.

Figuring out the spacing of the balloons was more math than my brain could take, so I cut out paper balloons (approximating the actual size). This accidentally turned out to be a kind of genius way to figure out how many balloons to smock, and where to put them.

Smocking finished, it was time for construction. All construction was completed according to pattern instructions, but I do want to add a couple of helpful hints!

Hint number 1: Before cutting out the armholes, I ironed on pieces of Sulky Totally Stable Iron-On Tear-Away stabilizer to both the front and back, and then machine-stitched on the cutting line, and just inside the cutting line to stabilize the pleats for sleeve insertion. I set all of my sleeves with French seams, so neither line of machine stitching was visible after construction, and my pleats stayed nice and plump! If you need how-to directions on setting a sleeve with French seams, @DressThemDearly has done a great post on this.

Hint number 2: Iron baby interfacing to your yoke piece before applying the piping; its a total game changer. No wrinkles and puckers, and you won’t see that seam allowance.

Twenty-five+ years of sewing and smocking, and I still learn something new on every project. Thank you for letting me share with you what I learned on this one!