I saw a video on Youtube shorts of a girl smocking the back of a white collared shirt to look like a spinal column. I thought it looked very doable, especially since I have so many collared shirts, and went ahead and started making a six-column grid on the inside of a collared shirt I don't wear very often. It was as I finished the grid and was trying to figure out the next step that I realized she didn't actually show the sewing process. Luckily, this style of smoking, often called "skeleton smocking", has gotten viral enough that I was able to find an actual tutorial by the channel overdoseondope. What I thought would be a quick afternoon project immediately became more complicated.

The smocking process involved stitching together points, securing them with multiple pass throughs and knots, and then linking to the next set of points to conjoin with an anchored thread with plenty of slack. As recommended by overdoseondope, I worked in column sections. While I was getting used to it, the first section took two hours, but the second and third section took about an hour each. My squares were also 5/8th of an inch, which meant I had a very large number of joins to do. The larger the boxes (an inch is usually recommended) the fewer joins, and the quicker the project.

Because this was a men's dress shirt, there is quite a bit of excess fabric in the shoulders. While the smocking drapes this excess fabric somewhat elegantly, as the back already has stylistic darts, I'm planning on taking in some fabric so it doesn't look like I have an extra pair of tits on my back.