Heirloom Embroidery FAQ's

Heirloom Embroidery is one of the skills you should develop while developing your smocking skills.  Adding embroidered touches here and there make the world of difference in embellishing either your smocking or areas around it like collars and buttons.

What is Fagotting?

Fagoting is fashion finishing term but in Heirloom Embroidery it is a stitch of branching together two separate finished elements with embroidery floss  (perle) to create one complete piece be it bodice or element attached to collars.  Such as adding a bias trim to a collar edge or adding tatting or crochet edging to a collar.  Dresses from the 1920's featured this technique a lot with bias tubing fagotted together.

Bar tacks are one style of fagotting but the heirloom world uses the openwork look of stranding floss crisscrossing in patterns.  Peek-a-boo ladder look is another term used for vintage lingerie ^#1

For machine heirloom sewing see the book Fine Machine Sewing by Carol Laflin Ahles in our Heirloom Sewing Books section.

#1 See http://www.deadlyvintagesweets.com/deadlyfashion.htm for more  excellent fashion definitions.