Smocked skirt in Morris Meadows fabric

I bought some Morris Meadows fabric recently when it was on sale at Country Bumpkin, with the intention of making a skirt or dress for Brigid for her birthday. I spent a bit of time looking at my magazines and books. I wanted something with a flounce, or tiers.
I found it a lot easier to search my blog than to browse indexes and magazines! This will only work, of course, for things I have  made, but I am a pattern reuser, and found what I wanted in the end using a key word search of my blog. It has been worth adding those labels and key words! Indexes are only as useful as their access points,  the name of the project isn't enough.

This pattern is easy to adapt to a larger size and I am hoping it will do justice to the fabric as well as being something a ten-year-old will want to wear in 2013.

I was able to cut the fabric so it will only have one seam - nice for construction but a bit of a trial for pleating.  I ended up replacing one pleater needle and breaking one thread!

I chose threads that blended, debating whether to include only a touch of pink, as in the fabric, or blue, gold, green and pink in equal proportions. I went for the latter.

I wanted a simple pattern that caught the colour lines of the pleated fabric but let the pattern of the fabric show through in places. In the end I opted for the simple trellis of the original pattern, although that was reflecting a rick-rack on the hem that I didn't intend to use.


It is really interesting to see how you can use a stitch to quite different effect on different fabric.

I'm pleased I stuck with the pink. It provides a depth and blends with the gold.  I added a five-step trellis at the bottom to help define the fall of the fabric.





Blocking took a while because of the stretch over the length.

Gathering the frill wasn't too bad - I neatened the edge and hemmed the bottom before putting in the gathering threads, then marked it all out in eight sections before actually gathering.



The waist has elastic. I made it a bit tighter than the standard measurement for a 10 year old, which seemed big, but built in an extra loop that can be expanded.


The result is as I had imagined it. Finding and embellishing some matching tshirts will be the next blog post!