Apron Sew Along Part 2 Peter Pan with Lace

Adding lace or piping to the Peter Pan collar is a great way to personalize your apron. The red Christmas fabric I found had a lace motif, so naturally I wanted to play on that. If you choose flat lace like I did, you will have to add ease to it. I ran it though the machine with a long stitch and pulled it a bit to slightly gather it. I stitched it to the right side of the upper collar with the lace edge on the inside - it will turn to the outside later and it is then you will need the ease to go around the curves. It is stitched on the 3/8" seam allowance. The lightweight interfacing is also stitched in here on the wrong side of the collar.

The next step is to stitch the under collar rights sides together with this piece. I pin it in place on top of this, then I turn everything over and stitch from the interfacing side, so I can stitch over the top of the previous stitching. I lifted up the upper collar so you can see the layers in the photo above.

When everything is stitched together, grade and clip the seam. Grading is simply cutting off half of the seam allowance from one of the fabrics so that the seam allowance is not bulky. Clipping is cutting triangle shaped pieces with the point coming close to the seam. This reduces the bulk in any curved seam.

Understitching will help the collar lay right. From the right side of the under collar, I stitch close to the seam, stitching the seam allowance to the undercollar. I press with my fingers as I go. Getting a presser foot into the curve of the collar is a trick. You need to use your smallest presser foot. I used my freemotion embroidery foot. Not ideal because I have to feed the fabric myself, but it is the smallest foot I have and I can get into the curve with it. Better than stitching by hand for me.

After the understitching, I press the collar. If you are making the Peter Pan collar without lace, you still do all of these steps, just without the lace. If you are doing the collar with piping, don't worry about gathering, the piping will stretch around the curves. I would empty the cord out of the ends of the piping, so the first 3/8" of piping and the last 3/8" of piping are empty of cording. If you use cording, grade the cording during the grading step.
Press the seam allowance under the neck edge of the collar and the under collar as shown here:

I hope this post is helpful to you. Let me know if you have questions!  Next up will be the reversible collar.

 

 

Apron Sew Along Part 1

Here are the 2 aprons I am making for the sew along:

They each take one yard of main fabric. A half yard of contrast collar fabric. One yard of lining fabric (both of these are lined with a nice white cotton I found on sale at Hancock.) and 13 inches of lightweight interfacing. The apron on top could be reversible, but I would never want to turn it around because I love Cori's fabric, so I just made it lined.

It's late, so I am going to post the easiest parts first. I like to do them first too.
Making the apron strings is easy. I like about a 1 inch wide apron string. I prefer to tie mine in the back, so I only make them about 26 inches long. You will want to make yours longer if you like to tie them in the front. The apron pattern is written for long strings - about 40 inches each. Play with your measuring tape to see what length you want. For the 1 inch width, I cut my strings 3 inches wide.
I press the long edges in about half an inch.  I also press one end in about half an inch. Then I press the long folded edges together. I stitch this closed about 1/8th of an inch from the folded edges.

After pressing the apron strings I like to press my 10" bit of bias tape for the key hole in the neckline. Cutting on the bias means cutting at a 45 degree angle from the grain of the fabric. If you had a square of fabric that was cut on the fabric grain, that would mean cutting diagonally from one corner to another. A quilters ruler will have 45 degrees marked to make it easy to cut bias strips.

Making the edges off set, will help you later when you apply the bias tape. You have the narrower part on top and the wider one underneath. That way when you stitch from the top, you are sure to catch the under part too.

I am off to bed now. Tuesday nights are pretty hectic around here, so I will plan on posting how the collars come together on Wednesday.
I hope you will join me for this sew along. You will love your new apron. The pattern for both of these is in one PDF, you can pick if up at Craftsy or on Etsy.

Apron Sew Along Part 1, Printing

I brought 2 aprons with me to Seattle for Thanksgiving and had to leave them behind for my mom and my sister. I think the women on your gift list will love having an apron from you too.

The first of my apron patterns is out and available on Craftsy. It includes the Peter Pan Collar apron and the reversible apron. The format is new, so there are special instructions for printing it. This is what the printing dialog will look like for printing the pattern pieces: (page 1 is the printing instructions and pages 8-14 are the pattern pieces)

and below is the dialog for the pattern booklet.  It is a little complicated to print this way rather than just clicking the printer icon, but I think you will like the pattern format. It will make the pattern nice to use and to keep.  If you want it to look like a professionally printed pattern, you can print page 2 on glossy cover stock (page 3 is intentionally blank) and pages 4-7 on nicer copy paper. After stapling into a booklet format, trim around the top and right sides of the cover photo. Let me know if you have printing questions or comments.

 I am working on the other apron pattern this week - the one with the pointed collar, Edwardian collar and standing collar options. Next week, the week of December 3rd, I will get into the actual sew along for this first pattern with detailed photos. All you have to do to be part of this sew along is get the pattern on Craftsy and follow along here. You  have time to get your fabrics and pre shrink them now.  If there is enough interest, I will start a Flickr group so everyone can post photos of their aprons. After this sew along, I will do another sew along for the other pattern.

Sew Alongs

Quite a while back, while I was ignoring my blog, another super sewing blogger asked me if she could do a sew along with one of my patterns on her blog. I expected 8 or 10 women to make my bag all together, but it turned out to be more like 45 or 50. It was really pretty amazing. Here in the final post about the sew along, you can see some of the wonderful variety of fabrics chosen for the project. If you want to read it, you might have to use google translate. Just looking at the pictures is fun though. Sew alongs are quite the internet phenomenon. From quilters (who have done this kind of thing through quilt shops forever) to dressmakers, sewing along is a popular and fun way to push yourself out of your comfort zone or make yourself complete a project that might otherwise get left behind. Thanks for doing the sew along Karin, I hope all of your talented friends are enjoying their bags.