Sewing: Apron for teacher

I made this apron as a gift for my son's kindergarten teacher. Hard to believe summer is almost here!

I chose, of course, an apple-themed fabric.
I used this pattern, although not exactly. I used the skirt pattern in the bottom right-hand corner picture on the front of the pattern but didn't use the pocket or waistband pattern. Those are very simple to make up on your own. I do like to use a pattern for the skirt on this one because the bottom has a wavy line (very technical term) and I know I'd screw that up in a second without a pattern!

After cutting out the skirt pattern, I hemmed the sides & bottom edges. Just fold it in, press (iron in place), then fold & press again (you want the raw edges completely enclosed). Then I needed to make the ruffles on the front. To do this, you'll need to sew a line of stitches across the top of the skirt. Set your sewing machine to the widest stitch (the stitch that is the longest). Sew all the way across the front, making sure to leave some threads at each end for pulling (next step). You can see how wide these stitches are in the picture below. Along the top edge are my wide stitches for making ruffles, and the right side shows the small stitches I used for the hem.


The next step is kind of fun. See those threads hanging in the top picture? They're on both ends of the skirt. You just pull the top & bottom threads to make the fabric ruff up.
Just keep pulling & moving the fabric over. I like to mark the middle line in the skirt and pull each side threads to make it all meet in the middle (see picture below).
When one side is ruffled to the middle, I go to the other side and pull those threads and ruffle it to the middle.
Then I make my waistband. This just needs to be a straight piece of fabric. It needs to be long enough to tie in the back with lots of extra room, and side enough so that you can fold it in to hem and sew it over the top.

Then sew!
Done!
But I decided to fancy it up with the teacher's name on a pocket, now that I know how to use the embroidery feature on this machine.

Done. I made a couple of pot holders to go with it and packed it all up. Those are so easy to make. I'll give the how-to in an upcoming blog posting.