THE PROCESS
Hello everyone! Over the past two weeks I have sewing an apron. This is my first time using a sewing machine and learning how to sew in general. The process was really rewarding! It was amazing seeing myself create a finished product from a piece of fabric.
The steps to create an apron are: to select a fabric, make a pattern, sew the seams, and add the straps. The fabric provided to us for our apron was a yard of black cloth for our main body of the apron. Afterwards, I took my measurements, and drew my pattern onto butcher-paper. Then I pinned the pattern onto my yard of fabric and cut out the pattern using fabric scissors.
Afterwards I cut out my neck and waist straps. For all the patterns I made sure to leave about an inch for the seam. My neck straps were cut out to be 36″ in length and 1″ in width. My neck strap length on the other hand was more of a free hand measure of where I wanted my apron however the width was 2.5″. Then I pinned up seams for the body of apron after marking down where the seems will be placed using a ruler and chalk. Next I started sewing for this I utilized black thread. Here I noticed that my very first seam was not as straight as I hoped. Another frustration of my was that the needle was constantly being unthreaded, although I did improve with keeping my seams straight, my issues with the needle persisted. After finishing my apron’s body, I pinned up the neck and waist straps to begin sewing, with these I had more excess after sewing the seams which I removed afterwards with the fabric scissors.
I then attached my neck and waist straps to my apron’s body with box stiches. I ended up with a total of 4 box stiches on my apron. Then after taking a look at the apron I felt as if the apron was to plain and decided to add 2 pockets at the very bottom. Both pockets were made by cutting out two rectangular patterns on black cloth. Which I proceeded to attach to my apron with black thread after seaming all sides of the rectangular pattern. For one of the pockets I decided to add a bit of flair by making a design onto it with white thread. (The design is my name written in Gujrati.)
Here is final picture of my finished apron:
Here are images of my finished workspace after cleaning up:
REFLECTION:
Things that I would like to improve upon in the future:
- Straightening my seams
- Straightening my box stiches
- My pin placement, as sometimes it was hard to remove the pins while simultaneously operating the sewing machine
Overall, I definitely feel a lot more comfortable using a sewing machine, compared to when I first started out, to create designs from scratch, even though I did have a rough time starting out.
COST ESTIMATE:
Materials:
- Fabric – $1.99/yard (Michaels)
- Thread – $1.99/ thread spool (Michaels)
I used a total of 2 yards of fabric (including scrap and waste) and 2 different thread spools so my material cost is 7.96 for the materials. I spent about 4 hours, labor and design, on this project for a labor cost of $60 (est. $15/hour). The machines were provided to us so the overhead was $0.
So the total cost is $67.96 for this apron.
