Sewing: Reversible Pinafore

I bought this adorable reversible pinafore kit (pattern + fabric) from AliyahsHopeChest via Etsy. It's like two tops in one! The kit was at such a great price that I bought a couple of other kits with different fabric. I will post on those here when I've finished them. This particular one is for the daughter of my friend M. It's like a co-op exchange: I make her daughter hand-made clothes and she babysits my son when I need it. Deal!

I love this vintage McCall's print (and I knew M would love it as well), and it works wonderfully with the pink polka-dotted fabric, which is cute in its own right.

Isn't the cross-strap back darling?

Just a couple of brief notes about the process of making the pinafore. I actually made this pinafore at the same time as another one (whose fabrics were black and white print). So I traced and cut them out of the fabrics at the same time, and I worked on both pinafores for each sewing and pressing step. There was one particular sewing step that lent itself very well to chain sewing (not exactly sure what it's called), and that was the joining of the shoulder straps. You can see in the photo directly above how the straps are still connected by the threads. I'm not sure if doing it this way saved me a significant amount of time since I only had to sew four sets of straps, but it did help give a sense of continuity instead of a start-stop feeling.

Overall I like the look of this pattern and would recommend it. There's also support for the pattern in the form of a couple of brief YouTube vids, which I needed in order to complete it, but I do wish there was a video showing how the very last step (the closing seams) should look. I'll offer closeups of how my closure seams look in my next post on the pinafore.

xo, Gladys