Smocking a Shepherd's Shirt- Part 9

Embroidering the gathered fabric might be easier this time around since I've done some and this is more than 1/4 inch wide. Ms. Armes states "The top and base of the tubing should always begin and end with two or three lines of Rope as this gives the greatest strength, and in the old smocks one or two lines worked close together were generally used to separate the blocks of 'Basket' and 'Chevron.'" My understanding is the stitch I've been calling a cable stitch, she's calling the rope stitch, so that's fun- my brain is already struggling with terminology!

Okay, so after much hemming and hawing I decided that I needed to mark off the area that I wanted to remain unembroidered for the placket of the neck opening. That means I wanted a minimum of 1/2" by 5" per side of the neck opening; however, I'd rather have a little more than 1/2". Each reed should be 1/2" but I decided to do 6 reeds at the center. So I found the center and basted those 6 reeds together down 5" so that I wouldn't embroider them. Here's a picture.

Side note: 

Oh, boy! Ms. Armes is right about that being a smaller compass. I should have used a thicker fabric, but I didn't really have one I wanted to smock so...

Back to the process:

 
I then had to embroider the reeds but of course I worried about the stitching looking straight and matching on each side of the opening. The thing is, I had bigger problems- like actually just doing the embroidery correctly! If you look at what I did, you'll can see I have very little understanding of what I should do! (Face palm!)


 

Here is what it looked like after embroidering both sides of the opening.


Here's after doing under the opening.

Here's the backside because it's always interesting to see the backside. You can see the knots for the embroidery from either side of the opening.


Here's after I removed the gathering threads.

As you can see, the neck opening is totally enough space to do a placket. You can also see that the narrow compass of this thin fabric impacts the balance of the elements of the smock and also the super gathered look of the fabric below the smocking.

Now the other side needs to be embroidered and assembled....