Making a Victorian Smocked Dress

Hello everyone and welcome! I hope you are ready for a bit of an adventure today because we are going on a full-on fairy tale journey in order to get to the land of Smocking. I may have bitten off more than I can chew with this one, but we'll see how it goes. Last week we talked about how the fairy tale concept of medieval styling and medieval clothing that is so common in their types of illustration and how that actually comes from the Pre-Raphaelites and their obsession with the medieval era and nature and trickled into the illustrations of the 19th century and how much influence that had not only on the fairy tale world but also on the real world when it came to dress reform and clothing, but where they look to the past to find the most elegant but comfortable styles of eras gone by and apply them to modern clothing. The last time I made a garment based off of the dress reform that was coming out of Germany most commonly. It's very 18th century inspired, but also has a lot of renaissance elements as well, and for this video I wanted to focus more on the Smocked styles. I came across so so many of these when I was doing the research for the last video and I fell in love with them, but I have never done Smocking before, so this is going to be a new thing. And since I can never just take on a simple project and just attempt to do a sampler, I decided I have to do an entire dress, and what better inspiration than to look at all of the gowns that were coming out of Liberty & Co, because they started up their costume studio in 1884 and were a huge inspiration to so many different parts of the fashion world. And the pieces that they produced were relatively iconic. I know that the name Liberty & Co wasn't one of the ones that we remember nearly as much, though Liberty of London does still exist today in that format. We think of Worth and we think of Fortuny and all of these big fancy names, but in reality there are dozens of these garments from them that survive, and they were incredibly well known in their era and very distinct. They have all of these beautiful Smocked garments out of these lightweight silks and wools, producing so many not only exquisite garments, but exquisite fabrics as well, because that's where the whole company got started. And they decided, well why not turn this into actual clothing as well? So they were known for producing high quality goods from the get-go, not unlike the sponsor for today's video, Birch. A good night's sleep can make all the difference in your day, that's why I'm happy to introduce Birch. They make mattresses and sleep products that are stylish, comfortable, and environmentally conscious. Not only do they offer the simplicity of having a premium mattress delivered to your door, but they understand the importance of materials. 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They have a lot of different styles that they created over quite a few decades, and I figured first to understand what I was even looking at, I should probably understand smocking. Smocking is essentially taking a usually large quantity of fabric and gathering it up via decorative embroidery-like stitches in order to create a pattern on top of it that is slightly elastic and can essentially create really complex shapes of garments while having little to no fabric waste. And there's not just one type of smocking, there's actually a couple different types. The English type, which is the one that we're going to be focusing on today, you gather everything up first and essentially have cartridge pleats on the garment, which you then go over and carefully stitch on top of to hold them into place before you release the gathering threads and the whole thing becomes more elastic. If you want to go with the American style, then you're actually creating a grid, and the decorative stitches themselves go into the grid, gathering everything up as you go. So it's not necessarily line-to-line vertical gathers for that, like it is for English smocking. All of the things that I could see with the Liberty gowns seem to be using English smocking, so that's where I put my focus for this particular project. Smocking itself dates back pretty far. You see a ton of examples in the 16th century when it comes to Renaissance shirts and other undergarments, and it's something that really picked up popularity in the late 19th century, not just because they were looking to historic garments for inspiration and for more comfortable options, but also because suddenly there was a lot more free time for a good portion of women. The middle class, especially in the 19th century, developed out of the idea of the women of the household generally weren't working, and so they could put their time towards other skilled things. Development of artistic skills was a great example of that. So there are more and more books and sewing patterns and instructions coming out on how to do these things yourself, and smocking was one of the popular options, along with embroidery and all sorts of other types of goods. So I started by looking into both modern and historic instructions on how to do smocking, and then trying to find as many Liberty gowns as I possibly could to understand what was considered typical styling. They had a number of different necklines, sleeves, there wasn't one particular style. Even year by year, they seemed to have a good variety. I ended up going with a style that was not a really high neckline, not just because I'm not always fond of a high neckline, but also because I felt like it looked really distinctly of the late 19th, early 20th century. Whereas the more open necklines, especially those with embroidery around them, had more of a vague historical nature to them. So I ended up deciding on a more open neckline. Looking at the sleeves, I really loved the ones with all of the different puffs on them, rather than just one large sleeve. So that meant, unfortunately, that there was going to be a lot of smocking in my future. I wasn't going to get away with just a little bit here and a little bit there. I was going to be doing yards and yards, miles and miles of smocking on this garment. Thankfully, I had a good fabric chosen. I went with this fabric, which is pretty plain. It's actually a rayon and wool blend, but I've had it in my stash for a while. I got it on major sale. I had no idea what I was ever going to do with it, and therefore, I can go into this without the feeling of risk of ruining a really expensive silk or something really nice. It has the right qualities, though. It is drapey and lightweight and will gather really well, but it's not prone to movement. It's not prone to stretching one way or another. It's fairly stable. Along with the tighter weave, I think this is going to be a pretty ideal fabric to test this out on. So, if you are ready to set off on this adventure with me, there will be some danger along the way. There will certainly be a little bit of math as well. Fair warning for those of you who might be scared of math, but I promise in the end, the result will be completely worth it. The actual pattern for the gown is going to be incredibly simple. It's just a tube for the body and tubes for the sleeves. The only place it gets complicated is up around the shoulders. I chose to inset the sleeves in a raglan style, since the neckline is going to be kind of like a sunburst style in terms of its gathering anyway, so that seaming will fit right in and disappear into the gathers. This meant that I just needed a raglan sleeve pattern to start and marked out where I wanted the neckline. As for the gathering that creates the smocking, that is where it gets much more complex. I went ahead and started off by making a sample. This is important because I need to know some numbers before I can start doing my math as to how many gathers I will need. I wanted first to know what length of stitch felt comfortable with the thread that I was using. I ended up choosing to go with a silk yarn, which is the same weight as the heavier silk threads that I was seeing on so many of the examples. It's not as tightly spun or as sleek as button twist, but it's a good weight and it's really inexpensive for the fact that I didn't know how many yards of this I was going to be using. Once I knew what length stitches I tended to do on the sample, then I could start doing the math. The equation is actually pretty simple. What you first need to know is how big will this be in its final format. So the pattern that I have wasn't spread out, it was just the fitted garment, I was able to measure that. So I could say this is 10 inches long, or whatever it might be. Then I would look at how many stitches per inch I tended to do when I was comfortably stitching. Let's say I had 10 stitches to the inch. Then I would know that I would need 100 gathers, or 100 stitches, to make it across the finished 10 inches. Then I could take that 100 and apply it to the actual big size of the full fabric before it's gathered down. It doesn't matter how deep your gathers are, it just matters how many of them you have in the final format. Sort of like cartridge pleating, and this means you can gather a lot or a little down very easily to get the right shape. The other thing you do have to keep in mind is that this is elastic. When it comes to the neckline, I am going to be adding some sort of structural interfacing around the edge to keep it from stretching, but on the arms, I will want that stretch. So this is another place your sample can really help in determining how big your final format needs to be, knowing it can stretch, and figuring out the percentage of that, just like you would for any stretch fabric. I use the full width of the fabric for the body and half the width for the sleeves, so once I stitched the tubes together and stitched the arms-ish things together, I then was able to start marking out all of my lines for gathering. I chose to go with the pencil because it was going to create the clearest, most consistent line. It could show through a little bit, but it didn't much in the end. I ended up placing all of my rows quarter of an inch apart in height, but I ended up going by centimeters when it came to figuring out the vertical widths of the gathers, because as I found, it was just a little off from the inches measurements. Got a little complicated. I did have to sort of sunburst these and rotate them around a central point in order to get the curve correct, so not everything is perfectly equidistant from each other. And down at the bottom, I'm going to be doing a design with some points, so I have little sections that will only be a small amount of gathering instead of having to gather the whole way around. It was then hours and hours and hours of putting in rows of gathering. I stopped each section at the shoulder seams, so that way I wasn't trying to pull evenly the whole way around one neckline. Instead, it's in four different parts, and leaving a space in the back because there will be a back closure. I try to gather everything up as evenly as possible to start with, but the neckline at the top will need to be gathered more. Again, this is radiating outwards, so it's going to need to be slightly different sizes depending on whether we're at the neck or down further over the shoulders. This is something that's a little bit hard to guess on a mannequin since my mannequin doesn't have arms, but I tried to work it down the best I could to about where I thought it should be, and temporarily knotted off these strings. I want to emphasize the temporary part. These will eventually get really tangled up as you're working on them, so they become less temporary, but for right now, I need to start there. I then tried it on inside out so I could still access the gathering threads, and the way that I made sure it wasn't going to continue moving once I got it gathered down to where I wanted it to be was to pin a couple of grosgrain ribbons around the top of the neckline, then again near the bottom of the gathers. This allowed me to stabilize what I was working on. I went ahead and pinned it on the back when I took it off as well, so that way everything stayed stable as I worked and manipulated this garment because it was going to be in my hands for a long time. From doing my sample, I also realized that this thread definitely was prone to fraying, so I decided waxing was the best option. I generally avoid using beeswax with silk whenever possible because it can change the color of it if you add heat. It does darken it, but it really was necessary so that way I could continue on for more than just a couple inches of stitches, because it's going to go through a lot of abrasion. I then started working stitch by stitch by stitch around this garment. Every single gather gets another stitch, depending on the type of design that I'm doing. I tried to do a variety of different design styles, different stitch styles, in order to vary up the imagery. Now, if you want to see literally hours and hours of me doing this smocking, I recommend checking out the multiple Twitch streams that I have under the Twitch playlist, because I live streamed a lot of this work in order to keep me from going crazy. If you want to see more about the pattern for this garment and the previous gown as well, I'm going to be putting extended videos and patterns on the extra content section of my Patreon, as well as on my YouTube memberships. This, however, took me so many hours to do. I found that I averaged around three minutes per inch with gathering and smocking, and I ended up with over a thousand inches of stitching. That means that I probably spent well over 3,000 I wasn't sure how I wanted to finish it off initially, so I left it raw and then decided in the end I wanted a gathered up look, a little bit like a ruffle, but nothing too organized and nothing too crazy. So doing this method of tacking it down, sort of gathering up as I went, ended up being the best option for me. For the sleeves, I will do the edge slightly differently because I know I have time, though. Once I had everything tacked down, it was time to start clipping all those gathering threads. Everything is held into place so it wasn't too scary of a step at this point. I was able to clip the ends and pull everything out pretty cleanly. I was surprised at how rarely I actually caught the gathering threads in my stocking stitches. For the sleeves, it was a much easier process of laying out where I needed to put the gathers. I was only doing them in little sets of four rows at a time, so the important thing for me was figuring out how far apart those sets would be. I simply put the sleeve on my arm and took cotton tapes and banded it around my arm until I got the right separation for the puffs. The next thing was to figure out how far apart each one of those gathers needed to be, because as I went down my arm, they would need to have fewer and fewer gathers because my arm gets smaller and smaller. So I started off at the top with around 3 eighths of an inch in separation, and by the time I got to the bottom, it was less than a quarter of an inch. In order to get the final circumferences that I need to keep it held up on my arm. Then it was back again to all of that gathering. I cannot tell you how ready I am to not gather anything again for a very long time. I did find in gathering that it was helpful to gather just a little bit smaller than I actually wanted the final version to be. As I was working, I found that no matter how tight I brought those stitches together, it seemed to grow the moment I took the gathering threads out. The neckline was a good experimentation with what the final numbers needed to be for stretch, because that's going to be held down by a ribbon that's going to keep it stable around the neckline. So I wasn't too worried about that growing or shrinking by a couple of inches, but the sleeves had to be particular. So being able to measure the gathering versus the finish stitching versus the stretch stitching with the neckline in its final format really helped me understand how much I needed to leave room for in the sleeves. Unlike the neckline, I knew that I wanted everything to be folded over in order to finish it off, so I went ahead and pre-folded up the edge before I did the final gathering row. It does tightly overlap two gathering rows, but I didn't want to catch it in that other one. Everything was kind of bulky as it was, so I didn't want to add more bulk, and gathered that up completely before stitching it closed. You can see just how much those wristbands can stretch. The hem was pretty simple. I made sure that it was short enough in front that I could walk around barefoot, and then eased it down as far as I comfortably could in the back without creating so much of a curve that I was going to have trouble with the hem wanting to pucker. Then it was time to cut open the back. That was a little bit stressful. Even though this garment doesn't have a fitted waist, I do think I might add that at some point, and even the examples that didn't have a fitted waist did still have an opening in the back. So I cut down as far as the waist in order to be able to hide the opening, and started roll hemming it back. I did find on the originals that I could see the interiors of, they have a pretty decent amount rolled back up at the top, which I think helps to stabilize some of the gathers at the very edge. Since the closure needs to go there, we're going to be adding buttons and loops next. I also reinforced down at the bottom of that opening to make sure that it doesn't continue to split any further. Just doing a buttonhole stitch around the bottom of it, and then putting what I tend to call a bride across as well, in order to make sure that it had no reason to have any pull down at the very bottom where it could continue to rip open further. Then it was time for the buttons. I think the originals were done on ring button molds, but I couldn't find those anymore, so I ended up getting some bone button molds from Burley and Trowbridge, so that way it wouldn't show the coloration through. They're a little bit thicker than I would like, but it's not a big deal. The fabric is then gathered down over the button mold, and the only decorative feature when it comes to these buttons is a little X in the center. It can help a little bit with making sure that the button mold doesn't shift around inside of the cover, but it isn't too necessary from my experience. I think it's more decorative than anything. and then a little loop is created with the thread to allow you to fasten them together. So I ended up figuring out the length of the thread by actually looping it over the button to make sure that not only did it hold the opening really snug, but I could also make sure that the button would be able to come out of the loop. That's a pretty important second part. I used two strands of the same thread that I had used for the smocking stitch, and just did a buttonhole stitch over those two threads. This is my most common method of making loops. I also added a petersham ribbon that I steamed into a bit of a curve around the neckline to finish off the raw edge and to keep it stable. I'm thinking about doing something like that to the wristbands, but since they still need to stretch, I haven't been able to figure out what the solution is. So I'm going to give that some time and come back to it later.