Making the Market Street Apron

Regal Fabric and Gifts is a smallish quilt store in Spokane—I say “smallish” because when compared to The Quilting Bee, which is the behemoth quilt store in Spokane, all other quilt stores look small. I like The Quilting Bee and shopped there when it was still in its previous (tiny) location, but I wonder if their move to a gigantic new building put some other quilt stores out of business. I know of at least one in the same area that closed. Regal Fabrics and Gifts is in a different part of Spokane and it may be that their customers don’t want to drive to The Quilting Bee. I am all over Spokane when I visit, so it doesn’t matter as much as it might if I lived there. I am not known for my brand loyalty.

I like Regal Fabrics in part because the owner always has a great selection of apron and bag patterns. The last time I was there, I saw that she had made up a shop sample from this pattern, the Market Street Apron from Cabbage Rose Designs:

The pattern suggests linen for the apron body. I am a sucker for anything linen and we all know how much I like aprons, so I bought the pattern. It’s a cross-back style , similar to the Cross-Back Apron that I made for Cathy last year using the pattern from Purl Soho. I liked that this apron design incorporated accent fabric with hem and bodice shaping.

Joanns has expanded the color range of the linen they carry. I prefer the 100% linen to the linen/rayon blend, and the last time the 100% linen was on sale, I picked up a length of royal blue. I had used some navy blue linen from Joanns for Cathy’s apron. That fabric was wonderful to work with. This linen felt lighter and the weave was less stable. I wanted to pull warp and weft threads so I would have on-grain cutting lines—there was no way to cut it straight with a rotary cutter— but the strands kept breaking. Arrrgggghhhh.

Half a bottle of Best Press later, I got something that approximated a 31” square with a separate piece for the front pocket. I keep a running mental log of much of what is in my fabric stash, and I thought for sure that I had a yellow and royal blue flower print that would have coordinated nicely. Nope. What I have in my stash are lots of prints with turquoise blue and not much with royal blue. Huh. Royal blue in the accent fabric wasn’t a strict requirement, but I was disappointed to discover that my brain is not as good at cataloguing my fabric as I thought it was.

I finally ran across a sufficiently large enough remnant of a pink calico with tiny blue flowers. As I was already two hours into this project thanks to the cutting issues, I wasn’t interested in perfect—I was interested in done. From there, it was a fairly quick sew to completion. I topstitched with royal blue thread. I always think that I am going to like an accent topstitching thread, but then I wish I had done matching topstitching. Oh well, done is better than perfect.

And done it is:

It’ll get put into the rotation and used. This is a long apron—I am 5’7” and it falls to just below my knees. On someone shorter, it might look like a maxi dress. (The pocket placement is excellent, however.) Being an origami-style design, getting into and out of it is challenging for someone of my limited spatial perceptive abilities. I’m glad no one was filming. And it’s hard to tell from this picture, but it doesn’t wrap very far around my body. I think I would prefer a wider body and slightly shorter back straps, as on Cathy’s apron. The pattern is very well written and presented. I found it easy to follow.

I don’t know that anyone else analyzes apron patterns to the same extent that I do, but it’s instructive for me to sew up all these different designs. If I were to make it again, I would use an all-cotton fabric or a cotton/linen blend for the body (Essex Yarn Dyed Linen comes to mind). That 100% linen is just too squirrely to work with.

I’ve got at least one other cross-back apron pattern of slightly different design that I’d like to try (the straps are wider and incorporated into the body instead of being attached separately). And this new release from Simplicity is intriguing:

I like the blue tabard-style apron. Maybe in a twill? Or a slightly heavier linen?

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I started listening to the Farmish Kind of Life podcast. It’s a good one; I plan to download and listen to all of them from the beginning, but the two I started with had to do with farm successes and failures and time management. My two takeaways were 1) It’s impossible to be successful at everything (homesteading) all the time. The example that Amy, the host gave, was that one year you might have had a fabulous garden but all your chicks died. Or you might have had exceptionally fertile livestock and lots of animals, but your garden was full of weeds. And 2) If you say you’re busy, are you really? If someone took the roof off your house and looked in, would they see you doing something or catch you looking at Twitter on your phone? (I congratulated myself that at the time I was listening to this podcast, I was also attaching binding to a comforter, so by that definition, yes—I was busy.) She also said that the key to good time management is writing everything down. I have to do that now anyway because I can’t remember why I opened the door to the fridge.