Renaissance Apron

I figured I needed some accesoires for my renaissance dress (the GGK) and I've long been wanting to try smocking, so I decided to make an apron. Since I had never done any smocking before, I firstly had to figure out how to do that. Thanks, Wikipedia! I still had some trial and error until I figured out the perfect way to get the look I wanted:

Upper left: gathering stitches 1cm apart. Upper right: gathering stitches 0.5cm apart, the version I ended up using on the apron. Bottom: Lazy as I am, I tried to get the smocked look without gathering at all. needless to say, I quickly gave up.

 
First things first, I had to cut the fabric. Smocking supposedly shortens the width of the fabric to a third, so after eyeballing how wide I wanted my apron to be at my waist (~30cm) and how long I wanted it to be (~70cm, a little longer than my knees) I cut a 90x70cm rectangle. Then I marked dots running 5mm apart, since that was the width I wanted my gathering stitches to have. I did three lines of markings (in regular pen, don't judge me, it doesn't show through to the right side of the fabric) and gathered the fabric, using a contrasting colored thread to make it easier to unpick later.

Two lines done, one more to go

I just realized that I didn't take any pictures of the actual smocking process, I'm soo sorry! I'll try to put in some pictures once I have some free time.

I'm really happy with the finished result, although I'm not sure if using red thread for smocking on a white garment is period accurate. I had some already-sewn straps from a not quite finished poject, so I whipstitched them to the top corners as ties.

Finished apron! ...well, not quite. I still had so much time to the actual fair, I decided to decorate it - with blackwork. Or, in my case, redwork. I picked out a pattern I liked from blackwork embroidery archives (the daffodils), drew it on some graph paper and from there copied it onto my fabric.

Yes, I used regular pen again. Don't judge me.

I used the same red thread as for the smocking (polyester, extra strong for handsewing) and emroidered with the wrong face of the garment (and thus the pattern) facing up. No idea if that is how it's usually done, it just works a lot better than everything else i've tried so far.

The dress, the shirt and the (half finished) apron on my dressform, just to get an idea of how the embroidery will look with the finished costume

I still have over half of the pattern to finish, so I'll wrap it up now. I will of course post pictures of the finished apron, as well as maybe some pictures from the fair.