Hi! I hope everyones apron turned out great. Full disclosure, I recently obtained an arm injury of which my right shoulder and arm, my dominant one, are practically immobile. This made sewing the apron a bit of challenge for myself. Despite all this, I still persevered.

Understanding my disadvantage, I wanted to make my design as simple as possible. A regular apron without a pocket or zipper–feature requiring more precision. I began with using the tape measure to determine the dimensions of my body. I determined that I needed a chest size of 10″ while I needed a belly size of 14″.  I also wanted a height of 30″ from my chest to my knees. Furthermore, I wanted to have 1″ additional margin that I could fold over and sew. I kept this seam thicker than the traditional 0.5-0.75″ because I felt that it was easier to fold a thicker seam than a thinner one.

One thing that was a bit of a problem, was sewing my seams in a completely straight line since my right arm was very weak. This was a challenging issue since I needed to make sure that the stitches were always on the seams and did not go directly on the fabric. To compensate for my lack of control, I found it easier to practice making slow and precise stitches on random used pieces of fabric.  Furthermore, one thing that helped me was using the cushion pins. I placed the cushion pins at the end of the folded seams so that I could guide the needle in the direction of the next cushion pin. Making it sticthes that went from one cushion pin to another instead of one end of the seam to another.

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I experienced several issues when sewing, however, most of my issues came when I was fished sewing all of my seams. For some reason my seams were delicate, and easily ruined as shown in the following image. To combat this issue, I decided to go over the seams once again in a different color thread. It was important to me that the structural integrity of my apron’s seams stay robust. If that came at a cost of aesthetic, I was willing to pay the price.

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I was sewing one day at the ODEK and to my surprise none of the sewing machines were working for me. I had no idea how to troubleshoot the devices. I asked the lab assistants for help, but they could not even find the solution. I resulted to using my lab’s sewing machine, but they used a faint white threat, that made sewing the box stitches especially hard to do. For example, since I was doing the white stitches on the white fabric, I did not know where to place my needle or finish my stitches. I solved this problem with putting four red dots with sharpie in the shape of a square or box to solve this problem. With these points, stitches on the box became significantly easier as it was obvious where I should place my needle.

Overall, things ran smoothly. On all sides of my apron I have 1″ seams. However I made the mistake of making 0.5″ seams on the top side. To keep some sense of symmetry, I kept the diagonal seams on the top side of my apron also 0.5″ seams.  However, since having diagonal 0.5″ seams adjacent to 1″ seams looked awkward, I decide to fold the two over each other and sew over to connect them.

 

In the future, I would have added a pocket or zipper to my apron to go the extra mile and add a more comforting feeling to it. Furthermore, I would have also kept all the seams the same dimensions for symmetry and aesthetic. I also felt that I would have made sure that the sewing seams that the sewing machine produced were tougher and stronger on extra fabric samples, before going over them with my apron. This ruined my apron’s look, as I had to add more stitches to make my apron more robust.

Cost Analysis

Cost Type	Cost	Price	Source	Quantity	Total
Materials	Fabric – Arrow Premier Navy White Twill	$14.99 /yd	Joann.com	1  yard	$14.99
	White Thread	$7.99/5500 yards	Amazon	36 yards	$0.05
	~	~	~	~	~
Labor	Sewing Operator and Prototyping Engineer (Me!)	$15+$32.91/hr		6 hours	$287.46
Overhead	Facility Cost (Machine Time)	$0.013/hour		8 hours	$0.1
	Quality Control
Design	Engineering and Development
	Iterations
Misc.	Waste and Scrap