Smocked dress made from Liberty Tana Lawn

Recently daughters Nos 1 & 3 visited their grandmother in North Wales and couldn’t resist rummaging through trunks of children’s clothes stored in the barn there. Home they headed with woolly piles of jumpers and shawls handknitted by their great granny along with an armful of dresses I had smocked for them when they were little. Grandson No 1 (he is the only grandchild) will benefit from the various jumpers (Fairisle and Aran) but probably not the dresses. (The cat had better watch out though as I remember daughter No 3 dressing a very docile feline in a baby’s white dress with pink smocking. In mitigation she was only 3. OK, I admit, I did help her get the paws through the sleeves and now I think of it, I probably fastened up the buttons too. I should probably have known better than to go along with it…)

The dress shown here is one of my earliest attempts at smocking. (The fabric is Liberty Tana lawn).

Tana Liberty dress with hand smocking

I saw this quilting machine in Liberty’s 20 or so years ago and having 3 daughters thought I might get some use out of it and save myself a bit of time doing the gathering for smocking. If you look at the photograph of the machine, you might just make out about 15 needles sticking out of the corrugated barrel of the machine. You thread up however many needles you want (and I seem to remember the needles are just ordinary ones that can be removed and replaced quite easily) and then feed the fabric through, turning the handle as you go –  rather as you would a rotary iron or a pasta machine. Now in a jiffy you have the fabric gathered up and ready for smocking. Without this wonderful gadget, you would need to either measure out a set of dots on the fabric, use a sheet of transfer dots, or decide always to use fabrics like gingham which come with handily built-in grid. But even then you still need to tack up 15 lines of gathering.

The machine was purchased. It was not, however, a very easy machine to operate smoothly. It was particularly difficult to get the same tension on each of the threads and this meant that the cottons became tangled and knotted together. My temper deteriorated accordingly.

But salvation was at hand. I think I must have been fighting with the machine’s mechanical imperfections one day when a friend came round. He was taken with the problem and very quickly announced that the whole thing should be mounted on a board and that the board should include spindles for the bobbins. An amateur woodworker and an enthusiastic problem solver he took the machine away with him and came back a few days later with what you see in the photographs. It worked beautifully – just look at the clever staggering of the spindles which ensures easy passage for the threads. Brilliant! (Must get the broken spindles replaced.)

Close up of smocking machine

There’s a rather sad coda to this story for the man who was kind enough to exercise both mind and hands to my rather unimportant problem was a diplomat in the Foreign Office. He later went on to become Ambassador to Bulgaria and then Consul-General in Istanbul, a historic post, said to be the first of Britain’s permanent embassies abroad.  (It was downgraded to a consulate when the Turkish Republic was declared and the embassy move to Ankara.) He loved Turkey, its people and culture, so much that he happily took what might be regarded as a somewhat less important post rather than wait for another ambassadorial position. He was killed in a terrorist attack by a suicide bomber while at work in the consulate in 2003. He had just returned from popping out of the building to have his shoes polished. Istanbul would probably have been his last post. Roger Short, requiescat in pace.