Spring Board Creative Collaboration + Ruffle Apron

I'm so excited to be revealing my project for the participation in Andrea's,

(Knitty Bitties)

Spring Board Creative Collaboration event!! :)

Whew!  That's a mouth full! ha!

Basically what this "spring board" is... is a collaboration of a hand full of bloggers from different genre's who are given a set package of materials to create something unique and fun!

You can read more about the collaboration, here on Andrea's blog, and see all the fabulous bloggers involved, and their projects!

 I received my package, from Jody at the Fabric Shoppe

 with these cute items:

2 fat quarters

Ric-Rac

Square of unbleached cotton

Doily

First, let's be honest.

I opened the package, in about the first 5 minutes, one of my children had stolen the ric-rac and lost it.

ugh.  I'm still on the hunt. lol.

Jody also included an adorable additional yard of fabric for all of the contestants and I just couldn't keep my hands off of it, when deciding what to create.  So... I used that too :)

Here's what I created!

A fun, ruffly, little girl apron!

And here's the basic idea, of how it came together...

(please excuse the awful lighting in the first few pictures.  It was about 2am. lol)

First I took 4 inch strips of the fabrics I wanted ruffled and put a folded seam on each end.

Then I ruffled each strip of fabric at the top, by pleating and pushing the strip up under the machine as I sewed.
Really easy!
After those strips were ruffled, I attached them to the bottom of the apron.
Layering them, one at a time.

I then took some green 3/4 inch grosgrain ribbon, pleated it, and ran it under my sewing machine, to get this ruffly look.

Then I changed my straight stitch setting on my sewing machine, to a zigzag setting, and attached this cute pink pom pom trim, on top of the ruffly ribbon.

And sewed this across the top of the highest ruffle, on the apron.

So it looked like so...

...man, don't you love natural light photos! :)

If you lift up the ruffles, this is what you'll see.

Also, I had to piece together the ruffle on the green fabric, because the fat quarter wasn't long enough, to span the whole apron.  But as you can see in this second photo, you can't even really tell, once you have the whole things assembled.

Then I took that small piece of natural fabric, ironed it flat, and applied a vinyl "stencil", if you will.

Basically, I designed a saying on my Silhouette, put a box around it, and then just pulled out the letters, to leave the negative space, or a stencil graphic.

I put it on the fabric, like so...

Took some metallic pink fabric paint, and a foam brush, and went over the vinyl decal.

I did a soft sweeping motion, because I wanted to be careful with the small little detached pieces that were in the "H" and the "O", to make sure they didn't come up.

Then, after the paint dried pretty well, I removed the vinyl, to reveal the perfectly painted words!

:)

I knew I wanted to sew the saying on the front of the apron, but I also wanted a little "frill".

So I took the doily, cut it up a bit, and applied it to the top and bottom of the saying, by sewing it.

I adhered the entire thing to the apron, using some heat transfer material, to get a good "stick"

Iron on the phrase...and

Ta-da!

A cute, girly homemade ruffly apron!

So fun, right!?  Great for cupcake baking, or just playing, kitchen.

I LOVE the way it turned out!  And so do the little girly's who get to wear it :)