The Smocked Dress LO

This is about all the smocked dresses Les made for me when I was little. I used Basic Grey "Lucky" pp, bazzill, the amazing Technique Tuesday stamp Patty sent me (for some not too amazing stamping - must work harder), and foam stamps & prima's that were my birthday pressie from Eva. Yes, a spoilt girl indeed! I scanned mum's old dressmaking patterns & stitch books. There was a bit of a disaster when I stuffed up the journalling boxes and then discovered I had no pp left. As a quick fix I scanned in one of the pieces from the Lucky Matchbook Kit and then tinkered with it in HP Creative Scrapbook Assistant to produce the journalling boxes which I was quite pleased with.
The journalling reads:
"It’s a funny thing but I don’t actually remember Les being permanently attached to the sewing machine or her knitting needles while we were growing up and yet there are very few photos of us in the family album wearing anything that was “store bought”. At the time they were just the clothes we wore, but now looking back I can appreciate the skill and the hours she must have spent. I feel a little sad too when I look at all the girly-girl dresses she made for me in what I suspect was the hope she would create the perfect feminine woman … all to no avail. What did she end up with? A trouser wearing, no frills, borderline goth!

My best dresses were all smocked by hand. Les told me last night how she used to babysit for the Beetham’s who lived next door when she was a teenager, and along with looking after the children she would be expected to sit and pull up their smocking dots for them! (Nothing like the well-to-do squeezing every last penny out of the pittance they paid her huh!) After a while of this she decided if she was going to do all this work she may as well teach herself the next step and taught herself to smock from books like these.

I think the last things she would have smocked were little romper suits for Joe when he was a baby. (She maintained if it was good enough for Prince William & Prince Harry to wear them, they were good enough for HER little prince!) Now her eyesight cannot cope with such fine work and with my eyes heading down the same path I’m sorry that I may have left it too late for her to teach me. Just incase, I’ve kept all the patterns & booklets tucked up with the things she made for Joe in the memory box so perhaps there will be a third generation to wear a “Les Original”.