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.