I'm feeling very pleased that so far - touch wood - everyone I talk to about my Exmoor National Dress project has been helpful and interested. If only all projects were like this.
Peg at the great Allerford Rural Life Museum is orginally a Londoner and now chair of the museum, which is one of those eccentric places where the labels are often bigger than the exhibit. In the Victorian school room part of the museum she drew out the basics of smocking on a bit of paper, making it sound as easy as pie, and promised to keep her ear to the ground for me. It reminded me of a Readers Digest book I hope my mum still owns, which as a child I perused on rainy days for the sheer wonderment of the smocking and plaiting instructions.
Maybe now it might seem as easy as Peg promises.
As an aside, I now realise that as a child of the 70's I was surrounded by the 'folk revival' and Victoriana ephemera of that decade, pamphlets on corn dolly-making, tie-dying projects in Jackie magazine, The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady. My parents were not remotely into this stuff but still it was pervasive at the time, and as a ludicrously resourceful child (and in the West Coast of Scotland, with many rainy afternoons on my hands) I got up to all sorts trying to make vegetable dyes, sew ragdolls and press flowers.
Themes : Exmoor, rural life, smocking, Allerford, Purlock
