Aprons of 2021

It didn’t occur to me, until the end of last year, that I had never owned an apron (cooking, shop, craft, etc). But one day, Dallas was cooking some chicken with his brand new button up shirt that I had just made him, and some of the grease was popping onto his clothes. I had never really cared about his free work t-shirts getting stuff on them from cooking, but all of the sudden it was something I made — and I decided that we needed aprons.

I used the Avery Apron from Sew a Little Seam (free with her newsletter subscription) for Braden’s apron, and then for Dallas’ and mine I mixed the Avery with the DIY Apron Tutorial from Sew DIY.

My hope was that I would get them finished by Christmas, but I didn’t finish them until a month later. Braden loves his, and reminds us whenever we’re baking/cooking that we need them! Braden loved the aquarium when we lived in Santa Barbara, and we would go all the time when we lived there. After we moved, it broke my heart every time he would ask to go. So I made sure that his apron included all of his favorite sea creatures — plus, this is the cutest fabric ever (click here to see stores that have it in stock). Dallas and I went the more neutral route with ours. Our fabric is from the collection: Kismet by Sharon Holland for Art Gallery (click here to see store that have it in stock). I like the way mine fits, but Dallas was not prepared for his to hit at his “natural waist”. Haha. He still wears it, but ties it loosely.

After I finished making the kitchen aprons, Dallas really wanted a shop apron for when he does projects in the garage (read: If you give your husband a cooking apron…he’ll probably want a shop apron to go with it. 😉 ). I remembered that I had some black twill canvas fabric that I thrifted in Santa Barbara, and Dallas really wanted cool topstitching. I purposely made his kitchen apron first so that I knew what changes to make since this apron was a little more labor intensive. I ended up lowering the curve quite a bit to hit at his hips, maked it longer, and widened it a little.

I had seen the Hedley & Bennett aprons online when I was searching for inspiration, and theirs looked great. I drafted pockets to look similar, made some bias binding out of the same fabric, and got to it. I sewed the pockets on first, which was pretty fun with my new-to-me (but old) Bernina 1020 machine. It got a little mad sewing some of the denser parts, but overall I was really happy with how it handled the fabric!

After sewing the pockets I serged the top and bottom, folded both over by 1″, and then topstitched. For the binding I did 1.5″ wide folded into thirds. I looked up the binding blog post from Helen’s Closet which was really helpful. I made sure to understitch and then did two lines of topstitching. The last step was to add webbing for the neck strap and ties. I just folded them down about 1″ and sewed a square and an X. That’s it!

I actually had to go into the garage and get this, take things out of the pockets, and lint roll the saw dust off of it so that I could take these pictures. It’s safe to say he loves it, and was very anxious to start using it. 😉

Happy apron sewing!