Smocking is a term used for a sewing craft that gathers material into fine folds, and often has embroidered or beaded surface decoration. This craft has been used in Britain since the 14th century, with examples shown in the Victoria and Albert museum, and the fashion museum in York.
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It’s earlier use was as a form of elastication, on shoes for slip on styles, cuffs collars and to embellish garments. The term smock as we know it today is from farmers smocks, which were a heavy cotton shirt, with a gathered yolk, or crescent shaped chest and cuffs. These were still worn in the 1800’s.
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The fabric was first laid out onto a sheet of paper, which had evenly spaced dots at 1cm intervals to form a continued dotted grid . Then a running stitch using each dot as a marker would be repeated in rows until the width of the panel was acheived. So for example, a cuff on a sleeve would need about 10 - 15 rows gathered in this way. Nowadays, there are smocking pleaters, these are machines that contain many needles in a row which are threaded before the fabric is passed through the rollers. The fabric then passes over the threaded needles whilst retaining the folds. The three illustrations below were pleated on a machine.
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