Smocked Apron
A couple weeks ago, THL Cristal taught a Lyondemere A&S meeting on honeycomb smocking, particularly as used in aprons. She had great handouts, based on some websites of other SCA folk had put on the web, showing honeycomb smocking in use on chemises and aprons of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. One of those sources is the Lutrell Psalter, so it is clear that such an apron will go well with the Gothic Fitted Dress.

So - on the way to Crown Tourney, I was a passenger in the car. I normally cannot sew in a moving car, but since much of the trip through the LA basin was at under 10 miles an hour, often about 2 mph, I had no trouble at all. I completed two projects (hemming a veil to go with the GFD and adding the carrying cord to the pouch seen earlier) while in the LA Basin, and was ready to start a third.

So I got out the yard x half yard piece of linen, and started gathering the top. Rather than measuring dots, I used the width of my left thumb as the measure, for going in and out of the fabric. The next line of gathering stitches was a thumb's width down, and I used the fairly prominent weave structure to keep me mostly going in a straight line. By the time I'd gotten three lines of gathering stitches done, we were finally out of the traffic jam, sunset had arrived, and I had to stop.

At Crown, i added more lines of stitching as I sat in the shade, resting, but knew better than to do the smocking.

At home again, I did the smocking stitch that Cristal showed us. Below are the results of the smocking, Still need to add the ties and finish hemming.


Here it is, with the smocking stitches done, and the gathering threads removed. Hand for scale.


And here it is, with the smocking pulled apart, and a foot for scale. Or at least, a big toe.