So this is my mini Dragonscale Smocking tutorial. Hopefully it’s easier for you to understand.

Supplies and starting off:

Look supplies! You need your fabric, needle, thread, a pen, and scissors. On your fabric you need to make the dots shown on the paper to the right (it was hard to see them on the fabric I used).

Disclaimer: Don’t use red embroidery thread, I did so you could see, but on my actual dress I used black heavy duty thread, but you can basically use anything semi-close to your fabric in colour.

Tie a knot a big ass knot in your thread and let’s get started.

Alright, here we are. you start on the middle dot one row up. Take a tiny stich through the fabric (we’ll be doing a lot of that) just enough so you catch the fabric.

Pull tight, and yay, a knot!

Alright, go over to the farthest right dot on that same row and do a tiny stich like shown above.

It should look like this.

Ok. now you stich the dot on the row below that lies in the middle of the other two places you stitched. ( you can see it better on the diagram to the right).

Do a tiny stich back where we started. It should look like this. Triangles!

Now the sort of tricky part, hold down the string coming up from the bottom (in this case that’s the knotted string, so it doesn’t really matter, but for the rest it will.) Ok, then pull tight the end of the string attached to the needle.

It should look like this.

Important! Make sure you take a tiny stitch through all the fabric bunched at this area to make sure it stays put (I forgot to take a picture of this, I’ll add it later).

Stitch through the dot in the middle directly above where you started, and repeat the process with the dots to the left now.

Here’s a picture of me holding down the connecting thread from the previous triangle (like I held down the knot earlier). If you don’t, that will get pulled tight too, and it won’t look right. That was the mistake I made my first time.

Pulled tight! Remember to stich them to hold them. It starts getting difficult to see the dots as they get obscured by folds, but just remember to make sure you’re stitching the right ones.

Repeat, switching sides each time, like in the diagram, and it should start looking like this on the back.

This is what it should look like on the front.

When you’re done, tie another knot, and cut the rest of the thread off.

Then you can iron it flat and tadaa, dragonscale!

(Which you then sew onto your base dress.)

 

Edit: The original tutorial from Michelle Carragher is here: http://www.michelecarragherembroidery.com/How-to-create-Dragonscale(2880143).htm