The biggest thing I got out of this week’s assignment was not a shop apron, it was a healthy respect for every seamstress/ tailor that’s ever lived. I thought it was difficult enough to get precise measurements on a rigid material like wood or metal with power tools that can cut perfectly straight for you. Using scissors to try and get something straight on a flexible material that wants to bunch and stretch? Goodness gracious.

That was also the biggest surprise during the project, because getting the correct shape on the pattern paper was way harder than expected. I was a mess after the wood-staining practice on Thursday’s class, so I wanted my apron to be as full-coverage as possible. I took my own measurements to accomplish this, and ended up with roughly 26″  wide at the widest point, 32″ tall, and 12″at the horizontal neck line. To make this pattern, I first tried was using a dowel rod as a straight edge, but the dowel rod wasn’t straight and that didn’t work even a little bit. See below.

I then tried going straight-edge to straight-edge across the page (like, drawing 10 inches with a ruler, then lining the ruler up with the exsiting line, and drawing another 10 inches). This also didn’t work because small differences in the angle between lines were exacerbated across the 3.5 foot length. I finally just used the straight edge of the page as a reference and measured two inch marks across that length, and drew a straight line through THOSE. It was a much longer process than I planned for, but you can see the difference between method number 2 and the winning method 3. (The upper, very crooked line is #2, the relatively straigher one is #3.)

 

Ironically, the resultant pattern still wasn’t symmetrical. It was off enough that I thought it might be noticable in the final project, so I folded the whole yard of pattern paper in half to ensure symmetry and repeated the process to get my final result.

I then taped the pattern on with strips of tape perpendicular to the pattern. This led me to learning that the fabric is flexible and would fall away from the pattern in between the taped parts. A fabric cutting wheel wasn’t available at the time.

Cue: More Tape.

Once I had the fabric cut, I practiced by sewing together some pockets for a cat toy. It’s not the prettiest, but he seems to love it so far!

With a little practice under my belt, hemming the apron was actually the easiest part of the whole process. Because all of my edges were relatively straight, I was able to pin them by just measuring a couple of 1 inch reference points across the fold. I used the reference lines on the sewing machine itself to keep the hem straight, taking out the pins as I went, and it actually worked out pretty well. It took a while to do all six edges but it was definitely the most satisfying part of the project.

That is, until on the final edge of the piece I accidentally sewed a fold into the piece. It’s hard to tell from the pictures below, but it was very noticable and very annoying to rip out and redo in real life. lol.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get pictures of process of sewing the straps on! It is not nearly as pretty as the seams,  so maybe that’s for the best. The only material left to make the straps was a thin (maybe 3/8″) material, which made doing a box stitch quite difficult. Instead, I tried to strengthen the stitch in a less aestethic way. I let the strap overlap the fabric by like three inches, did the outside of the box stitch around it, and then tried to zigzag over the strap. It was a lot of changing direction in very close quarters, so it’s probably the least pretty part of the whole apron. Precision is definitley something to work on in the future.  But I yanked it pretty hard and it didn’t fall apart, so for this first sewing project I’m pleading function-over-form. Anyway, here’s the finished result! With any luck it’ll save me from wood stain incidents in the future.

Approximate cost calculation: A high assumption of $5.00 for this yard of fabric and this amount of strap. $3 for plain cotton thread for machine assuming I don’t have any. I’m tying in my labor with machine time, and saying $20 total. This is because with all the trial and error, it took me about 3 hours.  If I were to make more versions, the cost of my labor would increase as the quality improves, and the amount of time needed would decrease, so that $20 would probably stay pretty constant. On the whole, I would say this piece cost about $30.