Smocking

If there was one thing I learned during Explored Stitch with Mary, (actually I learned a lot) it was that I loooooove smocking; smocking is when fabric is pleated and then embroidered on top of to create elasticity without elastic. The modern, industrial equivalent is pleating the fabric then sewing elastic onto the pleats.
For my final assignment I decided to take smocking, which historically was used on clothing, and use it to sculpt a form, rather than letting the smocking conform to a body. I used linen (the fabric of choice for a serf's smock) and created a giraffe.

Another Portrait

In case you were wondering what my mom looked like in the 90's when she still had that perm, this is it!
This was a piece based off the idea of the traditional Victorian Sampler for Explored Stitch, and since we had learned so many different stitches I was thinking that they were a lot like an alphabet and made a code. Then I took a sketch I had done, gridded it out, and made it into a phrase using the code I had made.