Hand Sewing an Apron in a Day

Do you ever wake up one morning, see the sunrise, and get such an urge to hand sew a thing that you take some fabric and your trusty sewing bag out to some 12th century ruins and decide to challenge yourself to sew an entire thing in a day? This doesn't really happen to me that often either, but I thought it would make a nice adventure, so here we are. The first thing we want to do is to take a waist measurement to figure out exactly how much fabric we need. An apron doesn't wrap all the way around the waist, so the measurement you need is three quarters of what your entire waist measure is. Now, because this is going to be a gathered apron and the fabric I'm using is a very fine cotton, I then need to triple this length to find out how much fabric I'll need. So, for example, my three quarter measurement is 20 inches multiplied by three means that I'll need 60 inches of cotton. Thicker fabrics won't be able to gather down as tightly, so you may need to only double these. You can also get away with just doubling a thinner fabric instead of tripling it if you don't have as much material to work with, it just won't be as densely gathered. Once you have your width figured out, you then need to figure out how long you want your apron to be. This is entirely up to you. I want mine to be quite long since my skirts are also quite long. This I'm doing just by eye, estimating roughly where I want this apron to finish and making a small cut at the waist level. Medium to lightweight plain woven cottons and silks will be easier to tear, which will helpfully give you a very perfectly straight grain edge. If you're working with a draw a thread, which is something I'll demonstrate momentarily, and then cut a straight grain line manually. This excess bit is getting tucked away for making up the waistband later. Before we get to the sewing, I first need to sort out this one rough edge which was hastily cut from the bolt and which is not perfectly straight. To do this, I'm just carefully going to draw out one yarn from the fabric so that I have a straight path to cut along. This only works on plain weave fabrics, so you'll just have to carefully measure and cut as straight a line as you can for more complex weaves. I know this sounds time-consuming, but having straight cuts in your fabric helps to keep your edges crisp and neat and helps your garment to hang straight, so it's always worth that little bit of extra effort in my opinion. Now we have a lot of hemming to do. Both long edges as well as the bottom hem edge will need to be folded over and finished so that they don't fray with wash and wear. This is done by folding the raw edge twice, as narrow as I can manage it, so that the fold is as unassuming as possible, and secured down with a felling stitch. When I get to the bottom edge, this is actually a finished selvedge edge, and a nice one at that. It doesn't have all the fluffy ends that a lot of modern fabric selvedges have today, which is very nice. I could, in theory, just leave this as the bottom, but it does look very selvedgy, and I prefer a more finished finish for this, so I'm just single folding this edge up and felling that down. I don't have to worry about double folding it since this edge isn't raw and won't fray. When it has got too cold and dark out for park sewing, retire to somewhere cozy for a cup of tea and snacks and waistband finishing. You'll need a long strip for this, and at least twice the length of your waist measure, and thick enough to be folded in half with a bit of seam allowance added. The thickness of your waistband is up to you, but I'm personally cutting a three inch wide strip for mine, which after folding and allowing for seam allowance, will make up around an inch and a half thick waistband. This leftover strip of cotton that we cut off earlier isn't quite long enough for the full waistband, but is wide enough for me to get two three inch strips out of, so I'm just tearing two of these and then seaming them together at the center. This is one of my favorite things about historical dress. It's very thrifty, and making do with what you have is very acceptable in all forms and classes of garments, from houseware and workwear to high court dress. You use what fabric you have in favor of finding new fabric to cut whole pieces out of. In fact, after cutting my two waistband strips, I'm left with one extra strip of roughly inch and a half-ish fabric, which I fully intend to cut up, seam together lengthwise, and make into a little patch pocket to go on the front of this apron in future, just so that I have the satisfaction of having made a completely zero waist garment. That is all to say, don't despair if you mess up and cut something incorrectly, or if you run out of fabric and have to do some creative rearrangement like I'm doing here. Piecing, as we say, is period. Now to begin the process of attaching the waistband. First, we need to gather this top edge down to its intended width. To do this, I'm just doing a row of small running stitches in silk thread, since silk is one of the stronger thread options, and I don't want to risk it breaking when I go to pull the gathers later. The finer the fabric, the smaller the stitches can be, but thicker fabrics should use slightly longer stitches to give the fabric more room to fold between each stitch. Then I'm marking a few registration points. The center front of my waistband, which is incidentally already marked by my seam line here, and which will match up to the center front of the apron, which I have marked with a pin. Then I need to mark the two points on the waistband where the apron part will stop and turn into the string ties. These points can be found by halving your original measurement, that one which was three quarters of the waist, and measuring out from the center point. So, for example, my three quarter measurement was 20 inches, so I'm measuring 10 inches out from either side of my center front point. These points are both marked onto the waistband with pins. Now I can begin attaching the apron part to the waistband. It's first pinned in those three places, center front to center front, and then either end of the apron is pinned to the respective marked points on the waistband. This way I know exactly how much room I have to gather the apron down to fit the waistband so that the gathering distribution is nice and even. Make sure that the outside of your apron, or the side that doesn't have the hems folded onto it, is facing downwards, and that you're pinning to the top edge of the waistband. The loose ends of your gathering stitches can then be drawn up to gather the apron, and this is why it's important to be using strong thread for this, if possible. You'll have to redo your gathering thread if it accidentally snaps, so it's also best not to run more than a meter of gathering with one single thread, just in case it does break. Then you only have to redo a meter or so instead of the whole length of thread, which is not a good time. This next step is called stroking the gathers, or using a pin to carefully align each gather so that they sit in neat, even folds. While this step is time-consuming, tedious, and not strictly necessary to the construction of your garment, and you can very easily get away with just running a stitch across plain pulled gathers, taking the time to do this extra step will ensure that your gathers come out looking nice and neat and professional, and will help you eliminate gathered clumps. Once you're happy with the arrangement of your gathers, it's time to then stitch the apron to the waistband, which I'm doing with a fine backstitch, placing the needle in the fold of each gather and bringing it up again to the fold of the one ahead. This is a very secure way to stitch down gathering that will ensure that all of your folds are individually attached and won't slide around out of place later. Finally, the waistband can be folded over, the raw edge folded inside, and the clean edge fells to the gathered apron to seal off that top edge. When you reach the end of the apron bit, continue felling along the waistband to form the ties by folding in the raw edges on both halves of the band and felling these edges The benefit of using a hard-wearing plain cloth like cotton or linen is that it can very easily be just thrown in the washing machine and cleaned as often as needed. Good strong hand stitching will withstand many rigorous wash, and I find often will outlast the fabric itself. So don't but they can be as complex and elaborate as you please, with upper halves to protect your shirt as well, pin tucks, additional ruffles, pleats, even embroidery or insertion strips if you're feeling particularly fancy. Or they could even be made from delicate translucent cottons or silks and basically worn as fashion accessories, as was often done historically. Personally, I'm more after the hard-wearing type that I can just easily throw in the wash and which can be ironed in half a minute, but I will, as mentioned, at least be giving this a pocket in future. I hope you enjoyed this day's little project adventure, and I wish you good fortune should you be giving this a try for yourself. This video is very humbly brought to you by Skillshare, the online learning community featuring thousands of classes in all manner of creative skills, as well as the business, productivity, lifestyle, and marketing skills you need to better boost your creative self. For those of you just beginning on your hand sewing journeys and would like to give this apron or any other sewing project a go, you can check out my own new class which has just been released on the basics of hand sewing. Even if you've never picked up a needle before, we'll take you through the absolute basics from how to thread a needle to how to start and finish the thread. I'll also walk you through step-by-step all the stitching techniques seen in this video, as well as the benefits and drawbacks of each stitch, so you can learn for yourself exactly why I've chosen to apply each stitch to each portion of this project. I am so excited to teach this class because I think sewing is just such an important skill. The ability for the individual person to be able to take control of the garments that we all wear in our everyday lives is very empowering, it's very liberating. In this class we are going to cover the absolute foundation you need to sew pretty much anything by hand. We're going to learn how to start and stop your thread, as well as to thread your needle. We are also going to learn the three most important hand stitches. If there's one thing I want you to walk away with, it is a greater appreciation of every ounce of labor, every bit of care, every bit of craft that went into every single stitch in every one of your garments, in a way that brings you joy. So let's get started! Follow the link in the description to start your 30-day free trial and to start building your creative skills today!