I’m incredibly pleased with how this came out. Sure, there are some small mistakes, but all in all I think it is adorable. Plus we made it from scratch – no pattern!

This is obviously a kitchen apron. Does anyone know if there is some kind of spray I can put on this to make it stain resistant?

Thanks to Purl for helping us pick out the fabrics, which include the strawberries from Kokka Fabrics and dots from Lecien.

To be honest it needs a bit of finishing but I don’t know exactly how to do that on my machine. I was thinking of sewing ribbons over all of the rough edges. Anyone know what the best thing to do is?

As cute as this is, the best part was how much fun we had making it (except when I nearly had my fingers sewed together!)

Here is the front:

And this is the back:

I’m incredibly proud of how well we lined everything up, especially around the zipper:

My last post on the dress is here, if you’re interested!

Now I’m trying something challenging – dress making! It is a slow-going process because, really, there just aren’t enough hours in the day. When I was younger my mum made me take a sewing course because she thought it was a useful skill for everyone to have. I agree with her now but at the time I’ll admit it felt a bit mortifying! But because of that course and her help, I used to kind of know what I was doing. Now I’m far less confident and I keep having to google things to remember the way to do things.

But we’re making progress. I took the picture below of my pattern-pinning:

And this is the top half. I worked really hard to make sure it was symmetrical!

To take a break from the tricky stuff, we used the extra fabric to make a bag that required no pattern! Very proud of making this from scratch, even though it was pretty simple:

I love the way the fancy stitches on the new sewing machine make even quick projects look really good!

Here are a few worthy tutorials to help you tackle basic mending chores:

Patching up jeans

http://damselindisdress.wordpress.com/2009/07/15/patching-jeans-cute-method/

http://www.ehow.com/how_902_patch-jeans.html

Hemming trousers

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A209008

http://www.ehow.com/how_2281295_hem-trousers.html

Replacing a button

http://www.ehow.com/how_4604_sew-button.html

http://www.wikihow.com/Sew-a-Button

Darning socks

http://www.ehow.com/how_648_darn-sock.html

http://blog.craftzine.com/archive/2009/03/darn_it.html

Mending split seams

http://damselindisdress.wordpress.com/2009/07/09/mending-101/

http://www.ehow.com/how_113353_mend-split-seam.html