July 17, 1998
e-Mail: smockingstore@att.net
Website: Garden Fairies Smocking & Needlearts Catalog
Smocking Newsletter - Beth-Katherine Kaiman, copyright 1997-2004, all rights reserved. Please respect my creativity and hard work and ask permission before you copy something from these newsletters for your non profit goup, I always ask that you quote me correctly and give me credit with a way for people to get back to me. Thank you. IF you wish to quote me in a venture for profit please contact me separately concerning royalties.
Dear Beth,If I wanted to get started on SRE on my own, without taking a class, what book would you recommend and what starting materials? I am clueless! I have a local smocking store, but the classes do not fit in with my schedule. I am pretty good at figuring out even difficult directions. Also, is using silk ribbon easier or faster than traditional embroidery? I really am not that excited about embroidering on my smocking and always opt for the simplest and
fastest designs so that I can get it out of the way! I have seen some of the silk ribbon designs in magazines and they are really gorgeous. Thanks for your help. <---Jane Willoughby
Dear Jane,
Silk Ribbon Embroidery isn't all that hard to figure out, the only hard thing is deciding how many books you can afford! LOL - this comes from experience, trust me. What I love about it is that within a few stitches you have created a 3 dimensional texture of beauty, unlike some crewel stitches that take forever to form something - like satin stitches, ugh.
The series of books by American School of Needlework are the ones I would recommend for the start of your journey. The instructions are clear, if you go flower by flower you will learn all the stitches you need to create any masterpiece. Once you get the basic stitches down then all of those complex and beautiful embroidery designs in Inspirations magazine (Inspirations Magazines http://members.aol.com/garsmock/insp.html) , Creative Needle and Sew Beautiful will be very easy for you to do.
The first book I would wholeheartedly for you to start with is The Encyclopedia of Ribbon Embroidery 131 Flowers ($9.50) (Silk Books), my only complaint is that they recommend you lock the ribbon onto your needle. I have found that this trick, while keeping the ribbon onto your needle has a tendency to cause more trouble in the long run than doing good.
The next thing you will need is a package of Needles especially choosen for you to play with, YLI has a set for $11.00 which contains Crewels, Tapestrys and Chenielle needles in all different sizes for all types of ribbons and threads (Silk Ribbon Supplies). Then I would also suggest getting a stash of ribbons to play with in colors of leaves and flowers mostly in the 4mm size but some colors can be in 2mm or 7mm. I would start out with the YLI washables first but there is nothing like the whoosh of creative flow that comes with working with the Petals ribbons, especially the Variety Packs ($13.00). They give you some of the most wonderous color combinations in one length of ribbon.
As far as fabric, that all depends on the project you are going to be working on. I work on moire, silks and velvets (all of which I have available) and I recommend that my students play around with sampler pieces first before working on a project but that they do try working the ribbons on all types of fabrics (see silk ribbon supplies page).
If you are interested in making a sachet bag, for example, the fat quarters of moire are perfect. I get about three bags per fat quarter.
I agree with you about SRE on smocking, some of it looks so tacky when it's not done right and it's tricky to work some stitches on pleated fabric. Practice on flat fabrics and save that for later when you are looking around for something new to embroider on.
Hope these ideas help, Beth-Katherine Kaiman
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In a message dated 8/30/99 8:27:36 AM, Ellen writes:Beth-Katherine, yes, the malls are a disaster and the clothes are worse. My dd is almost twelve and won't wear much smocking, but she will wear dressup clothes for church because that is a nonnegotiable rule in our house for everybody. I found that Contessa's Mother Daughter dress was a hit, with very little smocking on the skirt and can be done in a quiet color, so it appears more functional than decorative. I saw a really nice woman's dress in AS&E (1997, with a girl in a purple dress on the cover), it looked like a possiblity for my older dd who is now a womanly shape (she's 18). I have also discovered that heirloom collars on a blouse will be accepted with the Contessa Mother/Daughter jumper pattern I mentioned before.<----Ellen
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Hi,I remember reading somewhere that different pleaters have different needle spacing. Could you let me know what the spacing is? I am having trouble achieving enough "height" in my picture smocking. Perhaps the plates were stitched on fabric with a narrower needle spacing than my Sally Stanley. Do you know what pleater the designers use?
Thank you, Elizabeth Harber
Dear Elizabeth,
For the most part picture smocking designers use the 16row pleater as their pleater of choice for picture smocking mostly because when smocking first started the only pleater size available was the 16 row Read. As time went by the 24 row pleater came into being so that ladies could smock more that 16rows but by then the majority of smocking plate designers were using the 16row pleater and neglected to mark the differences between the two pleaters on their smocking plates. You will however see a little note on the bottom of the new plates that the design was worked on the 16 row pleater.
What to do? One of the main tricks that I have heard of is to use an extra strand of floss which will fatten out your cable stitches. What I do is use 4 or 5 strands as well as carefully observing how many stacked cables there are between a row and work my smocking consciously instead of allowing automatic pilot taking over and just smocking. Personally I prefer geometric smocking because I always make mistakes trying to go back and forth from a graph to smocking, but then I have a spacial dyslexia which kicks in at the dangest times.
I will make sure this question of yours goes in the next newsletter and will have more answers for you by Sunday - it's too hot right now and my brain refuses to function.
Beth
"Owl flew past a day or two ago and noticed me. He didn;t say anything, mind you, but he knew it was me. Very friendly of him, I thought. Encouraging".— Eeyore
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