What do you do when the deadline for the Flirty Apron Swap is just around the corner, and you can’t seem to find any of your apron patterns, or even a suitable fabric for starting from scratch?

Well, YOU are probably too responsible to get yourself into such a situation, but I am organizationally challenged in more ways than one. So last night, I googled frantically for a cute apron idea, and found this. Today, I made the rounds of home stores downtown until I found a cute tea towel:

To make an aprony shape, I followed the guidelines of the Ben Franklin tutorial, but balked at hemming.

I don’t know why. It’s not hard. I guess I’m not having an “I like hemming” day. Thankfully, I pretty much never clean my workspace, so I had a big pile of pre-made bias tape getting in my way the entire time I was trimming the towel. Ta-da!

I decided to leave about a 30-inch section for the neck, because who wants to squeeze her head into an apron? I ironed the bias tape to get any kinks out, and folded it in half, marking the center of the tape with a pin.

Then, I pinned the tape 15 inches on either side of the center. It’s easy to do with a cutting mat:

The pins indicated where to start pinning the tape around the raw edges of the towel. A bit of masking tape was invaluable at this stage:

And then I sewed away! Only very slowly, because bias tape can be a real mess when I go too quickly! I reinforced the edges where the bias forms the ties, because there will be quite a bit of stress on that area. Sorry for the blurry pic; all it shows is a straight stitch worked about four times back and forth:

I may have a hard time giving this one up. Good thing I was underconfident in my ability not to screw this up, and bought an extra towel!

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