A girl + inspiration + fabric = a cute ruffled apron!!

I bought this really cute material from a market stall run by my teacher aide and good friend, Colleen, with the idea of making an apron. Now I have never patchworked before in my life, but Colleen made it sound so simple.

A few months later, I found a cute pattern and was devastated to realise that I didn't have enough fabric to make it. So I started a long and harrowing search for an apron pattern that might work. Eventually I found this one and I decided with a little creativity it would work out.

Isn't it cute!! This great blog had a tutorial for how to make it, I just had to figure out how to piece together my material to make it work!

My Fabric!!

In order to create this gorgeous little apron out of my fabric I had to get creative. I cut up the smaller pictures and added patterned fabrics to create the right length strips.

Planning out what would go where...

All cut up and pinned up!

Then using my trusty Janome, I firstly zig zagged the edges, then stitched each piece into place.

 Zig zagging....

Straight stiching the pieces together....

A finished strip...then iron each seam open.

Next step:

Cut strips to correct length and add some extra fabric to the width of a couple of the strips so that all strips are an equal width and length.

Roll seams on all sides of the base piece of fabric and stitch down.

Roll seams on two short sides and one long side and stitch.

Gather the top of each strip and pull threads to gather to the length of the base fabric.

Start at the bottom, pin the top edge of the ruffle to the wrong side of the fabric about an inch from the bottom. Stitch gathers in place. 

Sew the next ruffle to the base about 4 1/2 inches above the top of the first ruffle, making sure the top ruffle overlaps the bottom ruffle by about an inch. Repeat with remaining ruffles.