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Die Cutter Aprons Part 4: Sewing it Together

With the iron-on pieces affixed to the pattern pieces, the rest of the project is simply following the pattern instructions...for the most part. 

Just your run-of-the-mill sewing...

Making Gathers/Ruffles

The apron pattern trims the bib, pocket, and skirt with a gathered lace or ruffled edge. There is more than one way to gather trim. Pattern instructions usually assume you don't have a lot of fancy feet for your sewing machine, so they explain how to do things with a standard foot. 

 Standard Foot Method

In this method, you take a length of trim and sew two rows of long straight stitches or basting type stitches. Gently pull the bobbin threads and scrunch up the fabric. Then take this scrunched or "gathered" trim and apply it to your pattern piece. 
All methods point inwards because the pieces are turned out. 

Gather foot

One of the fancy feet you can get for your machine is a Gather Foot. It uses the feed dogs to create an even gather as it sews it down. It is possible to gather and attach to the flat fabric at the same time with this product. 

It should be noted that it will not always work with every fabric type. 

Ruffler Foot

Another fancy foot that creates even ruffles. You set the foot itself up to create either tight or loose ruffles. It feeds using another device on the foot instead of the feed dogs. You can also ruffle and attach to flat fabric at the same time. 

Overlock Machine

Your overlock or serger machine can also ruffle things up without needing any specialty feet. (Granted, there is still a ruffling foot for a serger).  Each machine has different settings to accomplish this task. My manual has the settings I'd need to ruffle. 

Lace vs Ribbon

The two trim types I thought to use were a satin ribbon and some flat lace. I decided to use a gathering foot on my machine to gather and attach at the same time. I will admit it was a lot of fabric to wrangle and sometimes the lace would wander off. But this was a much faster method than gathering the lace first and then attaching it. 

Satin ribbon, however, did not ruffle as readily as the flat lace. Really, ribbon is just a glorified strip of fabric and the slickness of the satin meant that the feed dogs couldn't get as good a grip. It ended up tearing some of the ribbon. I had to mess with my machine tension and ended up going the route of gathering the ribbon first, then attaching it with a regular straight stitch. 

The results: 

Lace attached to pattern pieces before sewing assembly.


The Finished Aprons

The bib and pockets were two pieces sewn together than needed to be turned out. So the lace trim sticks out like so: 

Didn't fully turn out the bib. Oops.

The uniform I only trimmed the bib and skirt and didn't bother with the pocket. (I didn't have enough ribbon for it.) I also didn't want to sew back tie pieces so those were made from ribbon too. 
It looks very French Maid, right?

And this ends my little side adventure in iron-on die-cutting and ruffle sewing. Hope this helped. 

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