A smock for a gargoyle

This is yet another of the pintuck smocks that I made this summer. It's slightly less successful than the previous two for various reasons. This voile (part of Anna Maria Horner's Innocent Crush range) is actually one of my favourite fabric prints ever so when my mother bought this little stack for me as a birthday gift (from Ray-Stitch, I believe) back in March I was delighted.

However, once I'd made it and tried it on, my husband broke it to me that I take on the look of a gargoyle with such a busy pink print close to my face. I think I already knew this as when I presented myself to him I probably I had that lip-bitey look on my face that said something akin to: this is horrid, isn't it?

So you might think this top, which makes me look like a gargoyle, wouldn't have had too many outings, but strangely it's had lots. By the end of every summer holiday I've always added at least half a stone's worth of ice-creamy hedonistic fun to my frame (and, tiresomely, I begin every autumn by working to shed this same half stone) during those last days of summer this top provided welcome tent-like cover and felt like a perfect lazy-Sunday smock...sort of like wearing socially acceptable daytime pyjamas. And oddly, my husband forgot his original words and one day when I appeared downstairs wearing it (not wearing any face in particular, but perhaps most importantly not wearing the 'it's-horrid-isn't-it?' face) he said: what a beautiful top, you look lovely, as though he'd never seen it before. When I reminded him it was the Gargoyle Top he said that he had no memory of such a garment, making me think that in future I must always take care to arrange my face to suggest positivity as he's obviously swayed by such things. I'm unsure of what my 'yay!-I-look-like-such-a-fox' face would look like, but that's what I shall be aiming for.

Twitter friends tell me that I'd love a pintucking foot, rather than creating all these tucks by hand. Do you have one? Does it make pintucking so much easier than measuring them all out by hand? Or do you still have to measure them out before tucking? Do you know of any super tutorials to demonstrate the difference or how it's done?

The other area in which I don't think this print works with this top is that all those carefully tucked pintucks are lost in the busy pattern. You can see the difference below as the dobby fabric seems a much better canvas for them.

I now think I'd love one of these smocks in a fine needle cord for Autumn.

In case you're wondering, this is what I wish I had done with this fabric - the perfect style for the print and it would have kept the fabric far enough away from my face to leave me looking, if not foxy, at least just like myself rather than a ghoul on a fountain. This print is still one of my favourites, by the way. I feel as though I have unfinished business with it.

Florence x