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.