Dainty Dotted Day Dress

Last weekend, I traveled to San Mateo, which is just south of San Francisco, to attend a fun class to make this yummy dress.  The class was hosted by the Cable Car Cablers SAGA guild of the San Francisco Bay Area, with six of the 18 attendees making the trip from Southern California.

This dress was featured in the November/December 2000 issue of Creative Needle magazine, which unfortunately folded a few years ago.

Cindy Foose, our teacher, explained that she doesn't like pleating for smocking, so developed this dress which uses the dots in the dotted swiss fabric to guide the smocking. She also connected the skirts to the yokes by fagoting, also known as bridge stitching. What was unusual is that she had us smock with three strands of floche. Normally you smock with three strands of floss. Now floche is about 1 1/2 times the thickness of floss, so I was a bit concerned that this would overwhelm the delicate fabric. But as you can see in the photo above, it works! The dress even has smocking on the back.

Lace is attached to the collar and sleeves; here I have the collar basted to the template in preparation for the fagoting.

For the fagoting we used one strand of floche, as you can see in this photo. It goes pretty quickly and by the time I finally got around to writing this post (I started Saturday morning and it's now Sunday evening) I have finished all the fagoting except for the sleeves. Now on to the sleeves and construction of the actual dress!

I hope all of you have a lovely week and manage to get some stitching time in!