resetting smock

After spending lots of hours of smocking, you wear your fancy new smocked garment on a event, afterwards you throw it in the washing machine.

And it comes out looking all wonky and not at all that crisp and nice.
But there is no need to worry, resetting is easy, it just takes some time if you only have a ordinary ironing board.

You need lots of pins for this, star of by pinning on the edge.

Pin at every stitch for as long as your ironing board or garment allows.

Then you pull the fabric under each stitch, see, now you can see the crispness again, and then you put a pin.

Lots of pins, you need to have these without heads, as we are going to apply heat to them later on.

If you do not have a iron with steam, you take a piece of fabric, I use a linen kitchen towel and make it really wet in one end, Use a old washed fabric to prevent excess colour from staining your work. Squeeze out some of the water.

Lay the wet part of the towel over the smock.

Then really lightly touch the towel with the iron just where your smock is. Do not apply any pressure, you only want the heat. The towel should now do a sizzling noise, the water turning into steam. If you happen to have a steam iron, you can just use a dry towel and then hold it over the towel and use lots of steam on the smock.

Now take the towel away and wait for it to cool down and dry completely. If you have a vacuum ironing board this takes you no time, but for us without it can take several hours.

I do the sleeve on the sleeve board.

And this is how it turn out after cooling down, as good as new or perhaps even crisper. Now you can move on the the newt part of your garment and work your way around the whole smock, just to the same thing all over again.

Here is a smocked apron that I have done the same thing to.

And now you can go out, wear it at en event, throw it in the washing machine and then do it all again ;)