I’ve been struggling to hack down the UFO pile that’s been teetering and tottering on the corner of my sewing table.  Slowly, slowly, progress is being made.

This angel-sleeved bishop is one of those UFOs that I finished this past weekend and I’m happy with the results. I made it as my final project for my Advanced Stitches correspondence course that I blogged about last fall.

They give you a year to complete all of the units; it took me 13 months, which isn’t bad.  Although, funny girl that I am, I had announced plans to have my final project finished by January.   Hah!

I have already decided to enroll in another distance education course because I found I learned tons of new info from the class.  One of the reasons I struggled for a while with this project because, as usual, I’d had grand ambitions and at times getting the reality to align with my grand plans wasn’t always easy.  But that too was a learning experience and overall, I’m satisfied with the final results.

Let’s talk about the dress and not my poor time management skills, shall we?

The fabric was an ecru poly-cotton with all-over embroidered blue dot and scalloped edge.   I’d planned an entirely colour palette but when I discovered this fabric at Lens Mills, I thought it was too cute to pass up.

The pattern I used for this dress was an older (1980s) bishop pattern that Nancy, my instructor, provided as part of the course.  Nice little pattern but much less full than the bishops I’m used to smocking.  That small stylistic difference wouldn’t have been an issue if I was smocking a traditional geometric bishop design: something with lots of waves or trellises.  If I was making the dress again, or use the bishop pattern again, I will add width to the front and back pieces, so that they’re fuller.  I think that this amount of fabric would have been perfect for a heavier fabric like a quilting cotton or even a fine corduroy but the poly-cotton I used was quite light and as a result, the pleats were quite widely spaced along the bottom row of the bishop.  This, coupled with the embroidered dots,  made getting my wheat-stitch ovals even and symmetrical difficult along the bottom.  Of course, my wonkiest one is right at CF.  Murphy’s law.   But since it was a learning piece, I decided to leave it as was.  I may yet rip it out but for now, I’m OK with it.

I used a lot of unusual stitches in the execution of this plate:  closed herringbone, wheat stitch, raised cable and cable.  For the embroidery, I stitched bullion roses, detached chain leaves and bullion-wrapped buds.  Gotta say, I do like my bullion flowers.

Aren’t they pretty?  I wasn’t planning on the limited blue palette when I started the dress.  I had a nice selection of pinks and soft greens all lined up to go along with the blues.  But as I started smocking, I found I liked the restrained colours.  They remind me a little of delft pottery, with their soft, muted tones.

I closed the back of the dress with seven vintage blue buttons.  These were new old stock that I literally unearthed from Nova.  None of the blue buttons they had were quite right.  Too green.  Too blue.  Too grey.  Too big.  Not right.  I was getting desperate so I got down on my hands and knees and started pulling out all the old boxes of buttons that they have scattered throughout the shop.  I finally found the perfect buttons.  I had to blow the dust off the big box before pulling them out but I’m glad I found them.  Price on the individual card?  $0.30.  Guess they’d been there a while. 🙂

I also would have changed how I tackled attaching the neck binding.  I was taught to start at the top of the plate and work down.  In this case, that meant working a row of chain stitch in dark blue along row 1.  Since then, a friend suggested waiting to stitch the upper row of smocking until after the binding has been sewn down.  This eliminates a lot of the rip and fiddle that occurs when putting on a binding because you can make sure the stitches are perfectly spaced below the neck.  I got mine on pretty evenly, but in the future, I’m going to try her suggestion and see if it streamlines the process.

Finally, I do love my hem treatment.  I utilized the scalloped edge of the fabric for both the sleeves and the lower hem.  Hey, anything to save me from turning up a hem!

Then I added three rows of 1/4″ tucks.  Each tuck is made along one of the rows of embroidered dots, so the three rows of tucks are all identical.  It’s a tiny thing but it makes me happy.