My fabric is from Kiss My Stash Fabric Co.

I think you would all agree that every kitchen needs a pretty apron. Right? It’s the perfect time to pull out your fabric scraps and make a super cute kitchen accessory that you will love to wear. You will need the following supplies:

Apron Base fabric: approx 24″x24″ (this can vary by an inch or two without distorting the project.

Ruffle/Waistband/Ties fabric: approx 5″x40″ strips of 7 coordinating fabrics

You will also need your serger, decorative thread for the upper looper, your sewing machine, sewing thread and the Janome Ruffler foot if you have one. (If you don’t have the ruffler foot yet, you can gather your strips using a different technique)

Don’t you love a new box of thread? These is the Madeira Aerolock Boxed Set. PERFECT for serger projects.

Don’t forget to iron your fabrics, and grab your marking pens! Let’s go!

Do you know how to set up your serger for a rolled hem? It’s so easy to do on the AirThread 2000D serger. It really is a one step conversion. There is a slider on the front of the machine, before the knife, that says R———S. All you need to do is push the slider forward, and then set the stitch length to R.

Along with the rolled hem setting, you can change the cutting width here, or lower your knife.

These knobs on the side adjust your stitch length and differential.

Rolled hem turns out much nicer with just one needle installed, so remove one needle, and decide if you want a narrow rolled hem or a wider one (I picked wider, because I used some pretty Madeira embroidery threads in the top looper and I wanted that to show more.) Then, test your settings to make sure they are correct.

This shows a 3-thread stitch on the left, rolled hem with a solid gold color and rolled hem with a multi-color thread on the right.

Once your machine is ready to go, you can start hemming! This part goes really, really quick. After you are done the rolled hem, you can switch back to a regular thread in the upper looper and do a 3-thread edge finish on the short sides of the ruffles, and the sides/bottom edges of your apron base. I did not hem the bottom of my base, because it showed the selvedge with all the fabric info and I wanted to keep that.

3 thread and Rolled hemming is so useful for all types of things, like skirt hems, napkin hems, even edges on appliques! Click here to see a video of threading the AirThread serger and the steps to rolled hemming perfection.

Isn’t this multi-color 3 thread hem pretty?

This post is part 1 of the Ruffled Apron project. Stay tuned to see Part 2 next week!

Until next time,

JanomeGirl