It's now time for my project on fabric manipulation. I'm taking a bit of a departure from the folder, as I did with my appliqué sampler, and making a piece that I hope will show a bit of everything. I'll be talking about my inspirations for the project in a later post. Firstly, I'm taking the opportunity to learn about different kinds of pleating, and I'm diving in at the deep end to try smocking for the first time. For this project, I've got some real gold lamé - and I'm discovering that you have to get the stitch right first time! As it's gold leaf (well, faux-gold, at least!) over a plastic frame, once a hole is made with the needle, it stays there. There's no weave to manipulate back into shape around the initial puncture. So I've gotten my ruler out and made several rows of dots, each 1cm apart, the height defined by the part of the project I want to cover with it, the width about 2.5 times wider than that to allow for the gathering. I'm doing a kind of running stitch along the rows, picking up a few millimetres of fabric at each dot, then jumping to the next one with a long loop of thread. To get this right, I referred to another of the books I have in my second-hand collection: Smocking Design by Jean Hodges, published in 1987. A very helpful book technically, and one that taught me the correct way to lay out the smocking 'plan'. More on this when I've gathered it up.
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