Smocking a Shepherd's Shirt- Part 7

The latest endeavor is to embroider the box on either side of the area to be gathered into pleats.  Ms. Armes discussed at length the motifs that adorned the smocks of English agricultural workers. The smocks themselves, according to her, were coveralls and the motifs were in essence advertisements.  The motifs let others know what their professions were. I briefly considered putting some books and/or pencils on mine to indicate I'm a teacher but in the end I decided to do something more traditional and basic. Since I should embroider before pleating, I wanted to do something simple since I'm still unclear if this will actually be a wearable garment!! 

My motif is a simple tree in a diamond repeated. Here's a partially completed example.

I decided that I couldn't really recreate the diamond neatly, so I cut out a piece of card stock to make my diamonds consistent.

I realized that I hadn't talked about the embroidering on the pleats part of the smocking process before, so here is a bit of the sleeve. When you look at the right side after gathering the pleats it looks like this.

Well, to my eye that was an issue because you want the pleats to be flush with the rest of fabric. Thus, I endeavored to scoop up a little bit of the side fabric as i stitched the cable stitch across the pleats/reeds/tubing.

 

In terms of stitching on the pleats, you need to catch the fabric above the threads that draw the pleats together. My pleats are deep and it is really easy to stay far away from them, but I still felt it necessary to stitch close to the peak of the pleat. For this sleeve, I forewent doing a cool pattern and just did the same stitch, a cable stitch I think, across because honestly, I'm so in over my head!