Smocked Jumper

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I had 2m of black sweatshirt fabric that I bought just before lockdown - I liked the idea of making a nice jumper or sweater dress, but didn't really have any particular designs in mind, so it sat on the floor of my office for several weeks before I decided on what to do with it. As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm trying to work through my copious stash at the moment - I'm not sure if fabric bought so recently should technically count as stash busting, but I guess it's better than burrowing it away for ages in a cupboard somewhere just so it can count as such...

Anyway, the source of inspiration for this jumper (or sweater, for the Americans in the room) was that I've spent the last month slowly fixating on the idea of smocking (gotta fixate on something, right?) and I thought it could be fun to incorporate some into this project. After practicing with some different smocking techniques on some fabric scraps, I decided to use the honeycomb technique. I won't try to explain how this is done as I doubt it would make any sense at all without a tutorial, but this could always be arranged if anyone's curious about how it's done.

I kept the rest of the design pretty simple - the main shell consists of a slightly loose fitting front and back (made from my stretch block) which are both cut on the fold. The main part of the sleeves are 3/4 length, and also cut slightly looser than my usual stretch sleeve pattern. I then slashed and spread the bottom of the sleeve, not overly dramatically, just enough that there would be some gathering. The cuff was just a rectangle - as I knew the smocking would reduce the final measurement, I cut mine to be about three times my desired width, but this ended up to be a gross overestimation, so you probably only want it to be double, maybe even less. I'll have to try it again to be sure.

The smocking didn't take long at all once I had a grid sorted - hand smocking relies on a completely square and even grid in order to know where your needle is meant to go next, and this, it turns out, is not that easy to mark out on fabrics that don't take well to chalk, and are too dark for pencil markings. I ended up putting a pin in every grid corner, and this took forever! I'm sure there's an easier way out there somewhere, so if anyone has the solution, let me know!

Once the smocking was done, it was just a case of sewing everything together as normal - this meant sewing the front and back panels together at the side and shoulder seams, sewing up the sleeve seam, then sewing up the cuff seam - so that both of these parts are in tubes - then sewing the cuff to the main sleeve before setting the sleeve into the shoulder seam.

Then I hemmed the neck and bottom edge - I just used a narrow 5/8" hem on the bottom as I was hoping it would be just about long enough to double up as a mini dress. It wasn't. Generally I'd recommend going for at least a 2" hem on something like sweatshirting or jersey - these fabrics have a tendency to want to roll up on the raw edge, so the deeper the hem, the less likely this is to happen.

And that's about it! Since it's not the most seasonal thing to be making in May, I'm hoping I won't be needing to wear it much in the near future, but you never know...

Oh, and for those interested, the tartan skirt I'm wearing was made for a Minerva post* - the fabric was provided to me by the team in exchange for that post, and can be found here*.