Making an Apron from Scraps

It's funny how the best of things just happen sometimes. I mean they're not planned, you know. That's the way it was with this apron. It all started here (click to read my last post) with the basket of cookie making utensils and the handmade cup towel with the appliqued "B" made for a recent bride. I had the basket all filled with goodies and wrapped with cellophane and a bow and temporarily displayed on my foyer bench until time to tote it to the bridal shower when my daughter came by. She eyed it right away and declared, "I'd like a towel with my initial appliqued on it too!" So I, like any respectable mother, replied, "You can make one yourself." Neither of my daughters ever learned how to sew and I don't understand how that happened since I made their little outfits from the time they were crawling to the time they got old enough to tell me they'd rather wear jeans. So I considered this a good time to introduce her to this creative and useful craft. Well, somewhere between her saying, "I don't know how to sew", and me saying, "I'll teach you", the cup towel idea evolved to an apron.

We went straight to my sewing room and pulled out what we could use. We didn't want to buy anything, but just use what we had. And so here is what we started with. I bought more fabric than I needed for the towel and it just so happened that we had enough for our project. So we have the black and white fabric and the red accent fabric to work with. Next, Lindsay pulled out a lace tieback from an old set of curtains, I had stored in my fabric stash. If you are old, uh, I mean, mature enough you will remember the ruffled cotton country curtains that were usually white or ivory. They were the rage around here in the 80s. Well, these curtains were from that era. She decided to accent her apron with this lace.

Next, we took another apron and used it for our pattern. We folded it in half and laid it on the fold of the fabric and cut around it allowing an extra inch to turn under for a seam. At the top of the apron, we allowed an extra 2 1/2 inches to turn under. Since she chose to use the red fabric for a bottom border, we cut our apron about 5" shorter than our pattern.

So we pinned a 10 1/2" strip of red fabric to the apron, right sides together and stitched.

Pressing your seams with an iron is one of the most important techniques in your sewing. It will truly make the difference in your item looking homemade or professional. In this case, we wanted to press our seam to one side toward the red fabric instead of open like you would do in other cases.

Next, we folded the red fabric in half wrong sides together and turned 1/2 inch seam to the wrong side and stitched the red fabric over the previous seam you sewed. This hides your seam so that the back of the apron is as neat as the front.

Next, we turned under a half inch seam at the top of the apron and then turned it under about two inches and stitched to itself. We cut ties for the neck and sides determining the length by our apron we were using as our pattern. We cut our ties three inches wide, turned under a half inch on each side of the long edge and then folded in half and stitched together along the long edge of the tie and then stitched the short ends under also. This gave us one inch wide ties that we chose to hand stitch to the top and sides of the apron. You could also fold the ties wrong sides together, stitch and turn.

We cut a bias strip of the red fabric two inches wide and an inch longer than the apron width where you will be placing the red trim. Press under 1/4 inch on each side of the long edge of red bias strip, pin on right side of apron and stitch both long edges of trim onto apron turning under ends to back side of apron.

The last step was to stitch the lace tie back to the right side of apron just above the red trim turning under about a half inch on each side. And here's Lindsay modeling her new apron that SHE made. (She was having a bad hair day so didn't want me to get her head in the photo. HA!)

And here she is putting her apron to good use! If you've made it to the end of this post and have been inspired to make your own apron, I hope my not to precise instructions have helped in some way. Like I said at the beginning of my post, we didn't plan this. It just kinda evolved and so we decided what our next step would be as we went along which makes it a little more difficult to explain how tos. If you have any questions (since I might have left something out), feel free to ask them in the comments below and I'll be glad to try to answer for you. This time it turned out pretty good. Of course, that's not always the case and I most likely will not be sharing those with you. ;=)

I'm sharing this project at Susan's weekly Metamorphosis Monday. Check out the others! It's fun!