Project 41: Pleating

When Laurie pulled out this odd contraption I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. It had odd rollers and some needles sticking out, but I couldn’t fathom how it would all work together. She had me start threading each needle while she ironed our test piece of fabric.

Next, she wound the fabric around a dowel and we fed the fabric through the pleater. I turned the crank and look what happened:

Perfect little pleats started feeding themselves over the needles! I made Laurie stop so I could snap this picture because it was so neat. This step actually went very quickly. I stopped cranking every few turns to work the bunched up fabric off of the needles and onto the thread. When we were done we had this:

You can see in this photo that I have tied knots in the threads to hold the pleats in. As I worked on the smocking I tied them a bit tighter because I found that these pleats were too loose. Also in this photo you can see the beautiful gather that formed in the fabric below the pleats. Cute!

Check back tomorrow for my finished smocking swatch.