Children’s Corner Bishop-Sleeveless

I saw a sleeveless bishop a friend made some time ago and I had to make one of my own…I hacked the Children’s Corner Bishop to create this little bow dress. I’m not sure if there is an existing sleeveless Bishop pattern somewhere…but why buy when you can figure it out on your own? I’ll walk you through how to use any Bishop pattern to create one too!

If you haven’t read my post on smocking bishops straight, I recommend you do. I rely heavily on it in this post.

• Choose a bishop pattern and cut out the front and back dress pattern pieces.
• Cut two “front” pieces out of your fabric. Do not cut out the arm holes. I often do this by just ripping out two rectangles.
• Pleat the desired number of rows on the two rectangles. Leave pleater threads long (like really long, give yourself an extra 4 ft of pleater threads, two on either side.)

• Flatten each pleated piece back out (this is why you left your pleater threads long,) line up the arm holes from the front pattern-piece on one rectangle and trace the armholes onto the fabric using a water-soluble marker (or whatever marker you like.)
• At this point, I typically remove pleater threads from this area and re-tie them off to a pleat just outside of the armhole, making sure to use the same pleat as my tie-off location for each subsequent pleater thread row. This is now the front of the dress. You can cut out your armholes now or later, I like to wait until after I’ve smocked but its personal preference.
• Repeat this process on the other rectangle, using the back pattern-piece armholes as a guide. This is now the back of the dress.
• Tie off pleater threads at any length between than 7 and 12 inches. I usually just tie all of mine together.
• Mark the front and back accordingly with a wash-away marker.

• Smock the pieces using a smocking plate specific for bishops. The one seen above can be found here.
• Sew front and back pattern pieces together. I use French seams.
• Finish armholes using bias band (Each bias will need to extend from the top of the smocking on the front to the top of the smocking on the back).
• Use the neckband guidelines in your pattern to determine the width you will need the smocked front and back pieces to be. For Maria (size 4) her finished neck opening was approximately 13 inches in circumference. I divided that number by two (6.5 inches) then subtracted 1.5 inches to allow the bias band to tie at her shoulders. This made it so that my front and back pieces needed to be 5 inches in width each. So the basic formula for this is as follows: finished neck length in inches/two-1.5 in=width for front and back smocked area.
• Pull the pleater threads up to your ideal measurement (for sizes 3,4,5 it’ll be approximately 5 inches and tape pleats into place along the first pleating thread using double sided 1/4 in tape. This is a very similar technique to the one found in my blog post on smocking bishops straight. I go into a lot of detail on that post. It can be found here.
• add another row of tape as seen in the image below.
• Stitch between these rows.
• If you have questions about this part refer to the blog post on smocking straight.

• Attach bias binding to the front and back smocked pieces per the instructions in your bishop pattern. The only difference will be that your bias binding extends off the edges of your smocking to create the shoulder ties.
• I finished the ties by top stitching the binding together beginning at the end of my smocked piece and stitching to the end of the ties. Each of my bias pieces was approximately 15 inches in length. Make sure to finish off the ends of each bias piece.
• Hem your dress…and voila!! how simple and fun is that?!