Appliquéd Heart: Now it's a Finish

I posted a couple of days ago about this sweet little appliquéd heart. I mentioned that I wasn't sure if I was going to count it as a finish because I'd just put it on a ready-made canvas apron. I also mentioned that it would have been a nice touch to take the dingy old bias tape finish off the apron and put on a matching bias, but that I only had a fat eighth of the fabric and knew it wasn't enough.

The more I thought on it, the more I realized that the bias tape needed to come off. It just looked shabby, and not in a good way. It was late; the fabric shops were all closed and I knew I probably wouldn't have much chance of finding more of this fabric anyway, so I searched through my stash and found a pretty pink polka-dot fabric that matched really nicely. I cut two squares of each of the fabrics {although thinking back on it, I probably could have made rectangles work as well} and then cut the squares into triangles {following the instructions for continuous bias binding}. Then I swapped triangles and sewed them together so that each of my pieces had one striped triangle and one polka-dotted triangle. When the bias was finished, it made for all kinds of interesting lengths of each of the fabrics in the binding. I washed the apron before the kids all signed on it {for shrinkage and to make the signatures more colorfast once it was finished}, and it was obviously cut off-grain. I couldn't even it up because the signatures were pretty close to the edges {lesson learned for next time}. But I think that the matching bias binding around the edges really gives this cute apron the finish that it needed. And I feel less guilty calling this a finish. It is on its way to a sweet little Sister Missionary in Texas now.