Hand-embroidered and smocked dresses for little girls. Rabbit Whiskers designer-original children’s clothing is lovingly styled to inspire your child’s imagination.

A beautiful spring day, sunny, cool, and breezy. Pascal, (my bedlington terrier) and I, met our friend Penny for a walk along the canal. While I was busy looking for the ducks who swim in the canal, Pascal was looking to have a good bark at a pair of squirrels chasing each other up and down tree trunks and running across our path right under his nose taunting him, when Penny exclaimed, “Look at the beautiful wildflowers!”

Before me, tucked like a little pocket at the base of the hill, was a beautiful mini- meadow filled with delicate white flowers ruffled like lace in the breeze. Peeking between the white flowers and scattered sparsely atop tall green stems, tiny, singular purple blooms glowed like treasures in the sun.

How exquisite, I thought; both the beauty of the meadow and the beauty of the moment. Just a day earlier I had completed dress #408, my Meadow Flowers dress! (continue reading…)

Sunshine for hours, a meadow of flowers!

I just began work on a pretty, violet-blue fabric strewn with flowers of purple, yellow, blue and pink; reminiscent of a spring meadow. As I create the rows of smocking I’m busy thinking about what I might embroider into this meadow- perhaps a lamb, a bird, a tree-? Definitely more flowers- a bee? Hmm, we’ll see-

Look forward to”Meadow Flowers,”  size 2 - upcoming in the next few weeks ~

Sneak preview:

Just hatched! Announcing the arrival of two baby chicks, born in a field of cotton striped sky-blue and white; dotted with rows of yellow daisies. Arriving just in time for spring and summer, these chicks will be ready to go within a few days and are looking for a new home.

Pre-requisites for adoption: one little girl who likes especially, to wear pretty dresses, has a desire and love for baby chicks and will bring them with her on outings, to parties, to the park, and out to play.

These baby chicks love to travel, love fresh air, sunshine and flowers, love smiles and giggles; they are the perfect companions for a little girl’s path of adventure. Dress photos and purchase options.

October and November are beautiful months in Northern California. In many areas we have a “New England”-type fall, with leaves colored bright-red, yellow and orange. Temperatures aren’t as cold as they are in New England, but they are definitely cool and crisp, with deep-blue skies and little rain, making it a wonderful time to be outdoors.

After months of intense sewing, I find it necessary to take time off to refresh and replenish ideas. For me, the best place to do this is the garden, so most of the past week I’ve spent gardening. This meant clearing my backyard of weeds, broken branches and debris left by the deer, who used to call my backyard, “home.” I say “used” because I recently was able to close my yard with a deer fence, so I’m hoping to put a pretty flower garden there in the spring. (continue reading…)

Finally! My own baby grand-daughter, Grace, fits into one of my dresses!

A year ago, when Grace was born, I made this dress especially for her, it being the first time I’d ever made a giraffe (the particular dress that Grace is modeling is not for sale but if your preference is a giraffe, there is one for sale). When I gave her the dress, (size 1,) it looked huge. Throughout the year I’ve made quick checks; sizing the dress and sizing Grace. Each time, the dress looked so big, and Gracie so little. It seemed like it was never going to fit, but suddenly, it seemed she turned 1, and into the dress at the same time.

As I mentioned in my first post, it was with the birth of my daughter that my interest in smocking began, so the first time I saw Grace in the dress I got goose bumps. It was like seeing my own daughter as a baby again. I’m so excited to have Grace model for me- (I’m sure that I’m much more excited about it than she is- she would prefer to be playing than sitting still, anytime-) I hope some day she will know how much I appreciate and value these precious minutes of her life.

This brings me to the reason for writing this post, and that is to introduce Grace. You will be seeing a lot more of her. My hope is to photograph her in the dresses that fit her and are for sale. I think seeing a child in them makes it much easier to visualize what your own child will look like wearing one of my dresses.

I also think that having Grace model a smocked and embroidered dress, I can illustrate my “philosophy” of what a child’s dress should be. Children are naturally beautiful, their beauty far exceeding whatever garment they may be wearing. I think it is very important to enhance that beauty, as opposed to competing, and thus detracting from it. A well- designed dress will make one first notice the child, and later, notice the dress. This is one of the reasons that I love smocking. It is elaborate, and intricately detailed, while at the same time it is soft and under-stated. It never detracts, only enhances the child, as is visible in these photographs of Grace. First you notice the beautiful child, then you notice her pretty dress.

So now you will recognize Grace and then, I hope you will look at my dresses and visualize your own special child in one of them~

At first glance the dress is quite simple, but on close inspection, it is complex and intricate. When I embroider an entire scene on a dress it is extremely detailed, but unless the dress is closely examined, the detail goes unnoticed, which is how I think it should be. That means it is the child that gets noticed most. Later, the detail comes as a sort of surprise and I hope, for the child, fun to look at and give her own interpretation. When I create those scenes I am putting my interpretation into them and that is a large part of the joy in creating them. I hope the child can experience a similar form of joy interpreting the scene however she wishes-

Over the years, I have received some excellent ideas from customers, for example the hand-embroidered socks that I make to go with each dress. It had never occurred to me to embroider socks until a customer asked me if I would embroider a pair to match the dress she was buying for her grand-daughter. I agreed to do it and when they were finished I found they added a nice unique touch to the dress. They “completed” it, so I decided to have a pair of socks to match each dress I make. That was many years ago, and the socks have been a permanent companion to the dress ever since.

Then there have been several people who loved the dresses, but had no little girl to buy them for-  A few of those people bought a dress, framed it and hung it on their wall. Other people bought them for decor as well, hanging them in a special corner of a room, or on a wall, or in a child’s room to add a special “country” touch, or to suggest an antique look to a room.

One woman ordered one to hang in her family room. She gave me the exact colors that she had in the room; navy, green, red, and white- and she asked me to do something with a lamb on it. I used navy and white gingham fabric, smocked it in navy and put a large white lamb with a red ribbon around its neck, mounted on a green- wheeled, base with a long navy string attached to it- (a child’s pull toy, lamb) in the center of the smocking. She loved it and said that it looked wonderful hanging on the wall in her family room! Who would have thought?

And one more idea! Because these dresses are made to last, they can be handed down from one sibling to the next, but they also make great heirlooms. I know of a woman with three daughters, who bought a dress for each daughter when they were born. She insisted that the dresses not be passed down when they no longer fit. She wanted each daughter to have her own dress that was to be kept as an heirloom.

This is my fourth and final post on the process. After talking about the fabric, floss, gathering and pleating, and embroidering, it’s time to finish the Rabbit Makes a Friend dress.

The area to be hand-smocked and hand-embroidered on a girl’s dress doesn’t appear large, until you stop to think about filling that area with thread that’s less than 1/16 of an inch wide. If I’m smocking, each pleat has to have at least one stitch in it, and often more than one, depending on the design; that’s one stitch per pleat, every row. Often there are as many as twenty-five rows.

When I embroider, I embroider right over the pleats, so I’m able to cover many pleats at a time, but it’s much slower than if I were smocking. With embroidery, entire areas have to be covered with thin thread and no spaces can show through. Working fine detail such as the detail in faces, is difficult, and requires even more time. I compose the scene as I go, requiring trial and error, which can also be time consuming. And strangely, for the extreme amount of time that it takes to embroider a picture, if I make an error, it takes even more time to rip it out!

Finally, I’ve designed the end of the scene–but I’m still not quite done. Almost always after I’ve finished a scene, I go back and add a few rows of smocking at the top and the bottom. Then I pull out the gathering threads that the pleater put in, and it’s ready to be sewn into a dress.

Once the dress is finished I hang it on the wall above my sewing table where I can see it while I work on my next dress. That way I can occasionally look at it from a different perspective, which allows me to make sure that the dress is done; that I don’t want to add more smocking or change something in the embroidery. Once the dress passes that week on the wall and I’ve made changes, if necessary, it gets put into the closet with the others that are finished and ready for a little girl to wear.

The front of the dress has been gathered and pleated so in this post I’ll begin to talk about the hand-embroidery.

Before I could begin embroidering the scene on the front of the Rabbit Makes a Friend dress, I had to make sure that the pleats in the middle were secured. This I do either by smocking on the right side of the fabric as a part of the scene, as I did with the hills and a few rows above the hills, or by smocking on the wrong side of the fabric, which is called back-smocking. That way if the smocking doesn’t fit with the design or scene that I’m making, it won’t show. (I need to note that I’m now ready to begin embroidering the middle scene, but I still haven’t decided what that scene is going to be.) This happens often because every dress I make is an original. I make the scene up as I go, sometimes trying one thing and, not liking it, tear it out and try something else until I get something that I like.

I always start the embroidery with the head of the main character. I start with the head because I feel the most important thing is to create a face that is attractive; either cute or pretty. I want the character to be appealing immediately. If I can’t make that happen, I abandon the idea and try another. This way I’ll know before I waste time working on the body and the rest of the scene. Fortunately it’s not often that I have to abandon an idea.

March 21 was the first day of spring! When I sat down that morning and picked up my dress front to continue working, I had almost completed the rabbit and had finished embroidering one flowering tree. It’s extremely rare that I get that far into a scene without fully knowing where I’m going, yet that’s exactly what happened with this dress.

I was putting some finishing touches on the rabbit while thinking about what I was going to have her do. As I followed the curve of her arm with my thread, it occurred to me that she should be holding something, and then, “thank-you first day of spring, ” without another thought, I knew where my picture was going. If you look closely, you’ll notice a little bird in the rabbit’s hand. The rest of the scene will still require much time, but I am relieved that the main part, the most difficult, is basically finished and I finally know where I’m going with this picture! The remainder of the scene will be mostly background “fill-in” work. Even though I’m more than halfway through with the scene, it’s still going to require many more hours before it will be finished and ready to make into a dress.

There are basically two reasons the embroidery takes so many hours. The first is that it’s extremely important that all of the stitches lie smoothly, one right next to the other, if an area is to be filled in. They can’t be very long because then they will easily catch on something and pull, distorting the object they are depicting. This is especially important on clothing, because it is subjected to all kinds of things when it is worn. Because the fabric I work with is soft and pliable rather than stiff, it’s difficult to know how tight to pull the threads. If they are pulled too tight, the fabric pulls with them and alters the shape. If they are too loose, they lie in gaps, look sloppy, and get caught on things. They have to match exactly, the area being covered.

The second thing that makes it so time consuming is the embroidery thread itself. It comes in packets where six strands of thread are twisted together to make one thick strand. The floss can’t be used as it comes packaged because the thread is much too thick to make the nice, smooth-looking stitches that are necessary. When I smock, I split the floss in half and smock with three threads at a time. When I embroider, because I often sew such fine detail and because I want to have smooth stitches, I usually split the floss and use only two threads at a time. Because two strands of thread are extremely thin, I often have to go over and over the same spot to get the three-dimensional appearance that I like to have.

Enough for now, I’ll continue to talk about the embroidery in my next post and we’ll finish up the dress.

I’d like to tell you about the process of gathering and pleating the front of the dress. In my last post, I started taking you through the process of sewing a Rabbit Whiskers dress. I’ve already selected the fabric and embroidery floss.

The first step is to gather the dress front. That does two things. It holds the pleats in place until they’ve been smocked, and it gives me guide lines, marking the rows to be smocked. I use a pleater to gather the portion that is to be smocked. This is the only part of dress-making that I dread. It’s hard to believe, but at least for me, this is the most difficult part. The portion I’ll smock must be cut at least three times wider than the desired finished width. Even on a small child’s dress, this amounts to a large piece of fabric, making it awkward and difficult to work with.

I prepare the pleater by threading the needles with extra-strong, long strands of quilting thread. After ironing and laying the fabric out flat, the dress front has to be rolled around a 3/4″ round, long wooden dowel. It is crucial that the fabric be rolled tightly and evenly around the dowel. If it’s rolled crookedly, when it passes through the pleater the rows to be pleated will sit on a slant, causing the finished design and picture to be slanted. The pleats won’t line up, one row directly on top of another, causing puckers and gaps in the fabric and making it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to smock.

Once the fabric is rolled onto the dowel I slowly feed it through the pleater. To begin the process, the fabric has to be fed into two grooves, one on each side of the pleater and, at the same time, a knob at the side of the pleater has to be turned so the eight threaded needles will catch the fabric and pull it in. To do this really requires three hands, so I use my chin to push the knob until the fabric is in far enough for the needles to catch it. It’s crucial that the fabric be fed through the pleater evenly. I hold my breath until I’ve finished pleating and can check to see if it went through correctly; if it didn’t, I have to pull all of the threads out and start over again.

With the dress I’m working on here, Rabbit Makes a Friend, I was pleased to see that the rows were even, indicating the fabric had gone through correctly, but then I noticed that one of the rows was missing a thread. Apparently the thread had gotten caught in a crack in the table where I was working, and pulled out. That meant I had to start the whole process over again! Fortunately, my next trial was a success.

Finally it’s time to begin stitching. I always start with the smocking. If I’m planning on smocking the sides and saving the middle for a scene, as I planned to do on this dress, I will smock the sides first, as you can see from the photo. In a dress of this design, I think of the smocking as a background; a sort of frame for the scene that will go in the middle.

The next post, I’ll write about how I begin hand-embroidering the scene.