Saturday, May 18, 2013

Goofy aprons for Mother's Day

I found a tutorial for a hilarious and completely unnecessary gadgety-apron, but I fell in love with it and thought it would make fun Mother's Day presents for my mom and mother-in-law. The bottom of it is a dish towel, and it can be removed from the top via the separating zipper.

I kinda sorta followed the tutorial, but I didn't use the exposed zipper technique.  I also bought some wide twill tape (love that stuff!) to use for the neck and the ties, because I loathe making fabric ties.  They never look as nice as I think they should, they're a pain in the butt to cut/iron/stitch, and twill tape or cotton straps make aprons and bags look a little less Becky Home-Ecky in my opinion.  I found that most kitchen towels were really really wide (28" or 30"), and it felt funny to have an apron wrapping that far around my torso when I was imagining the finished project.  The shortest I could find was a 26" basic kitchen towel from Target, which worked perfect because I was able to find some 26" zippers at JoAnn's.  Not the highest-quality towel, but it saved me from having the hem the edges of a larger towel.

This was my first time installing a separating zipper, but it was no harder than the regular kind. It was also my first time sewing on terrycloth, but that again wasn't much different than sewing with normal heavy-weight fabric. I fact, I kind of liked it because the loops of the cloth hid any goofiness in my stitching or loopiness in the bobbin thread. I need to get my tension fixed by the Viking peeps, I think.

I didn't take a picture of the apron I made for Barb because I wanted to get one with her modeling it. Here's the one I made for Mom (I'm an idiot and forgot to take a picture of her in it when I gave it to her last weekend!), along with the second hand towel to zip in:


The store was out of 26" zippers in white, so I couldn't make a second one for Barb. I will check the other JoAnn's sometime and see if I can find one because I have another hand towel all ready to use!  This was really fun to make, and I would totally make it again.

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