SMOCKING CLASS IN ITALY

I signed up for a smocking class in Italy with Maaike of The Dressmaker's Academy — who was also my teacher for the kimono class in Japan and the French jacket class, both at her studio in Italy. I'd never smocked anything before, but I love hand-sewing, so I thought it would be fun to learn.

For anyone not sure what smocking is: it's the technique where you gather fabric into tight, even pleats and then stitch across them so it stretches and holds — those honeycomb and diamond patterns you see on the front of old-fashioned children's dresses and very expensive blouses. It looks like magic. It turns out to be mostly maths and patience.

The first surprise was the smocking pleater — a hand-cranked machine with rows of needles that you feed the fabric through to pull all those perfectly even gathers. It wasn't quite what I expected, though to be fair I had no idea what a pleater was meant to look like in the first place. I'd assumed smocking was done entirely by hand from scratch, so watching the fabric come out the other side in neat little rows was oddly hypnotic.

Then came the actual smocking — the stitching across the pleats — which was tricky. Keeping the lines straight and the tension even is harder than it looks, and I spent a lot of time unpicking. But that's 80% of sewing, if we're honest.

First up was a sampler for practising the stitches. It took real concentration — keeping everything straight, putting the needle through the right number of pleats each time — and I got there in the end, even if I was slow about it. After that we moved on to contemporary smocking, which is a completely different thing: much quicker to pick up, and I loved it.

Would I do it again? Yes — I've already got a beach dress smocked and waiting for me to embroider it. Traditional smocking I'm glad I learned, but it's the contemporary style that really got me. I've got plans to use it on some pillows and a few textile pictures — haven't started those yet, but they're coming. Modern smocking on modern things: that's where I think it belongs, at least for me.