baby clothes, bubbling under

my aim to make a response to some more baby clothes is quietly developing 

i think i have given up the idea of something using organza appliquée - i had thought i might copy some of the details onto organza, but now feel that does not fit - a few attepts at fine smocking helped me to accept that this was something i was not going to tackle succesfully! i know i can't stitch to Gramie's standards so rather than try to replicate it i aim to honour it

i wanted to stay with the smocking and explore that, so the idea of stitching into the hollows created by large scale smocking appealed to me

a few, very time consuming, attempts to recreate the drawn thread work finally led to this

the original

i could not find instructions on how to do this particular style so i had to combine techniques - my experiments also went through a few different threads, finally settling on a very fine vintage cotton linen thread which might have been Gramie's originally

the pin tucks and dots were easier to achieve so the sample ended up like this

i think i will try a sample with even larger scale smocking so that there is more room for the details in the hollows - these seem rather cramped

at the moment i am visualising the finished piece in a shadow box type frame, but that is open to review - an alternative would be a book including photos of Daniel and Monique, with the smocked piece mounted in a deep box-page to preserve the texture