smocking

[this week’s smocking, silk on ecru cotton]

One of the very nice things about this newsletter is recognising names of people who read my original yarnstorm blog, the one I began in 2005 (until who knows when - it faded away in the end). I started this one on a whim, not sure if anyone would subscribe, so it’s lovely to know readers from what seems like a million internet years ago are here. Like Susan Rees-Osborne in Australia who messaged me last week to alert me to an online smocking workshop, and on Saturday night I was pleating and stitching in Cambridge as part of an event organised by Tatter in Brooklyn and taught by Annie Coggan in Maine.

This is exactly the kind of amazing connection which the early blogs enabled. Links were made between people who loved knitting, stitching, and all sorts of domestic creativity but hadn’t really been able to share it all - until these wonderfully fast and immediate self-published journals made it possible to discover someone in Lisbon or Seattle or Melbourne who was equally enthusiastic about bamboo knitting needles or making aprons or watching Cary Grant films while quilting. (For old times’ sake, let’s have a picture of Cary or, even better, watch him learning to knit.)

(“I dropped me purl”, Cary Grant in Mr Lucky, 1943)

But back to Saturday-night smocking. (Smocking gets autocorrected to smoking all the time. It may also be an addiction, but at least it’s a clean one.)

I’ve just read Living Rooms by Sam Johnson-Schlee in which he discusses the art/craft divide/hierarchy. If you make a quilt and put it on the wall, it’s art. But put it on a bed or settee or sit under it, and it’s more like to be considered craft. Wherever you stand on the art vs craft debate, boundaries and crossovers - and I think it’s ridiculous to try to separate it all - there still remains the question of practicality and usability. Does something which is beautifully made even need to have a function? Does it matter?

[classic, silk thread on a fine ecru cotton, using iron-on dots transfer]

I find after all these years of making useful things that it’s difficult to create something more conceptual, something that just is what it is. I appear to have a well-trained self-conscious streak which prevents me from saying something I’ve made is simply art. This is, I think, what stops me going all out, wild, mad, expressive, extreme with smocking; at the back of my mind is a little voice asking ‘what will you do with it?’.

[the time I did go extreme, silk threads on calico]

And yet I am enthralled and fascinated by what smocking does.

[Welbeck Street Car Park (1970), London, demolished 2019]

So it was interesting to hear the words Annie uses when discussing her approach to smocking. She come from an architectural background, and thinks about smocking as a construction based and plotted on a grid - shades of Agnes Martin - which creates rooms and spaces. (Her explanations made me think of the Brutalist car park above.)

[Tatter Blue library chair by Annie Coggan]

As far as I know, she doesn’t wear smocked garments but she lets chairs wear smocked covers; the one in the Tatter Blue library has a central panel which harks back to the style of old smock frocks worn by agricultural labourers.

I like her “modernist” approach, as she calls it, and her unorthodox style. They reinforce the fact that smocking is largely undocumented, a loosely defined technique which has until recently mostly escaped the notice of textile historians probably because of its associations with low-paid workers’ clothes and home-sewn children’s garments. Listening to Annie makes you realise you can take liberties with smocking, and allow it do what you want it to do.

I followed Annie’s exaggeratedly large-scale honeycomb smocking method (above) with external threads which is based on a pre-drawn grid and traditional pulling-up and pleats. I think this would be amazing on a huge-scale print.

I also tried it on some light but strong Japanese paper (above), and could get very excited about this.

But I still prefer my freehand honeycomb technique which just uses a grid of dots done with a marker pen - no advance pleats - and I tend to take threads down the back of folds.

When I smock, I think about creating 3-D effects with 2-D fabrics, the folds, gathers, pleats, what is visible, hidden, revealed and how this changes with movement, what could be inside the spaces or pockets, the theatricality of it all, the way smocked fabric undulates, moves in and like an accordion out, little smocky words like tubes and tucks and ties and gaps, the fact that smocked fabrics allow for actions such skipping, painting, scything and shepherding. (Workers’ smocks were made with cheap hard-wearing, plain-weave, unbleached cotton and cotton-linen blends and this is the type of fabric I mostly prefer - but with brightly coloured silk threads as a contrast.)

[muslin, silk threads]

I’ve also had a go on a Princess Pleater hand-turned machine at one of Caroline Bartlett’s workshops (now there is someone who doesn’t feel compelled to explain her pleated, folded, stitched pieces in terms of function), and I could happily pleat metres of light, airy fabrics this way just for the sheer pleasure of playing with the fabrics on the threads, moving them up and down, opening and closing, reshaping.

[silk, cotton perlé threads]

And this is what is so important for me - movement, texture, tactility, surprise - and its is the also the stumbling block to developing my ideas. I’d have a real problem with ‘hands off’ signs on something which is so wonderfully mobile and expressive and comes alive with touch. It wouldn’t stay on a wall for long.

Or I could make an ethereal Molly Goodard-style dress, cross boundaries, and wear my art:

Bon dimanche!