Smocking a Shepherd's Shirt- Part 10

I set myself an arbitrary deadline of Monday to finish my smock by because basically I was convinced it wasn't going to be a wearable garment but the only way to find out was to make it. So tally ho, as it were...

First up cut the neck opening and make the placket for the neck...


 

Here you can see I'm pinning my 2 inch wide placket in place to be sewn. I sewed it to the inside first (with a 1/2" seam allowance) and then folded it over to sew on the front side. Did the original smocks get sewn on an electric sewing machine? No, they did not. Don't care!

 

Here it is completed. Be sure to enjoy the white dots left behind after I ironed out the ink from my gridding.

 

Let's do a spiffy little diagonal stitch at the base so it sits a little nicer!

 

You can see it sits pretty nicely. You can also see my crooked embroidery! Yay!

A different angle of my neck opening...

 

I don't have any pictures of it but I did do both sides. If you can't imagine it, you can scroll back and pretend it's the other side! If you're good, you can scroll down and see the next step! (If you're bored, I don't know how you made it this far!!! But amazing!)

Now we're to the part of adding the shoulders to the front and back. I've put my scissors underneath the shoulder straps so you can see my dilemma.... That neck opening is super far away from the shoulders. What am I going to do? (Insert the Jeopardy final question thinking music here!)

 

Well, I decided to basically make a bias tape to bind off the raw edges. Seriously, does anyone think I'm going to wear this garment? Not me... Don't get me wrong, I want to like it. I've put a hell of a lot of effort into it, but if we ask the Magic 8 Ball, it says "All signs point to no".

Well, I'm still giving it the old college try and attached the shoulder straps like I would a yoke, which means I had to cut out two more shoulder straps.

Then came the collars... Normally you only have one collar and it goes from one side to the other around the back of your neck, but this intriguing garment has two collars, one over each shoulder. And I am growing ever dubious that this will be an attractive garment... Sigh!

Okay, collars attached, it's time to do that bias tape thing I mentioned before. But in the interest of full disclosure, I didn't make bias tape, I didn't even use one strip of fabric... But I did bind it off!

First set of stitches...

Second set of stitches...

Next up- the sleeves!