Re-run: Smocked Brother-Sister Frogs

This post is a rerun.  I’ve spent most of every day this past week tending to my dearly loved  89 year-old aunt.  She has been hospitalized and has suffered a rather dramatic fall into dementia, so I have been trying to arrange a move from her assisted living facility to a higher level of care in a nursing home.

Between dealing with her needs and tending my 2 year old grandson Alastair, I have run out of time and decided to re-run some old posts until I can get caught up.   I doubt if any readers have read all  or even most of the 386 posts from the birth of this blog.  So here it is……

I love to see siblings in coordinating clothes.  My son and daughter are fully 4 years apart in age, so I was only able to indulge in this practice for a very short time.

But my granddaughter Laurel is just 15 months older than her brother Robert so I have made them many “matching” outfits.  Laurel loves it, her mother loves it and Robert, frankly, doesn’t care one way or the other.

This picture shows that  Laurel is enjoying the sibling hug.  Robert, frankly, didn’t care one way or the other.   But they did look adorable in their smocked frog outfits.  My husband and I had taken the children with us to an afternoon reception for the grown up daughter of our dear friends.  She and her husband have been living and working in Norway  and Jennifer had returned to her childhood home in Florida to thaw out and warm up.  The children were charming and received their many compliments graciously.  Well, Laurel was gracious.  Robert, frankly, didn’t care one way or the other.

Both garments are blue microcheck “ready-to-smock”  polyblend fabric, though the smocking is from two different frog plates.  Robert’s insert, probably 45” pleated up, had plenty of pleats to make cute, crisp little frogs from the Cross Eyed Cricket’s “Frog  Pond” plate.  But when I tried to smock just one of the frogs at the center front of Laurel’s dress, it looked like Jabba the Hut.  It  would have scared the bajeebers out of any children in sight.

Many picture smocking designs cannot be worked on a bishop and believe me, I tried this one every which way but up.  I regraphed it, reducing the width and increasing the height.  Then I smocked and regraphed twice more, but to no avail.  The fabric was almost worn out from the having the smocking ripped out so many times.

So I chose a different Cross Eyed Cricket plate, “Tadpole Lesson“ and extracted one small frog from the scene to use on the bishop.  The water lily is just free form bullion knots.

I wish I had feather stitched Robert’s collar and cuffs in green.  But I was out of time.  And as usual, Robert didn’t care one way or the other.  Maybe I’ll do that later for Alastair.  Maybe he will care.