Staycation Day 5

Well today was a much more productive day than yesterday.  I decided to set aside my landscape wallhanging and just work on something completely different.

I ended up spending the day on my guild's current challenge project, which is to do something with a panel fabric.

I've never done a challenge before, so it will be interesting to see the results of this one and if I was in the right vein with my project.  In August we will all display our results at the guild meeting and members will vote for their favorites.

I decided to convert this panel into an apron.  I went mostly off of the apron pattern in my book "Sew Liberated," which has a lot of patterns I would characterize as "hip."  I altered the pattern slightly because it had a deep v neck and for me an apron is worthless if it doesn't protect your shirt front, because that's the only thing I ever seem to get grease/sauce/flour on.

First I thought pretty hard about what I wanted to do, then carefully cut the panel into its component pieces.

It was pretty easy to know that the center panel was the skirt, and my apron pattern called for a wide waistband, so I immediately flagged the line of snowmen for that.  Then I spent a long time arranging and rearranging the other pieces to find something I liked for the top.

One hard thing about cutting up a panel is that there are no seam allowances.  I did an incredibly scant seam by edgestitching all of my seams (so like 1/8" or less seam allowance) to try to minimize how much I cropped each image.

I made a lot of dumb errors on this, and they reinforced the importance of reading the instructions.  I added a ruffle to the bottom of the skirt, following the pattern, but I figured I remembered how to make ruffles myself and didn't need to read how to make them.  Well, much seam ripping later, I finally read the instructions for a refresher.

Same with sewing together the component parts, to eliminate raw edges you basically stuff things inside each other and topstitch.  I discovered this after I had already stitched the waistband closed and had to rip the whole thing open again!

skirt with ruffle

close-up of ruffle

bodice and waistband

mostly asembled

finished!

The pattern calls for eyelets on the waistband and a little string running between them, so this won't be completely done until I get some eyelets, but otherwise I was happy to have pretty much completed something today.  The entire apron has muslin on the back side.  Honestly the stitching isn't great, there are a lot of ripply parts, but it should be functional.

I'll be curious to see how it is received at our August guild meeting!