Old and New is a big area, but when we got the brief I was already thinking about aprons. A friend had been wearing a lovely apron from Sicily when we went to her house for a meal. I rarely wear aprons - for cooking, cleaning or painting - which explains why all my clothes have stains of some kind or other on them! So I wanted to explore aprons.
Did you know there is a whole world of people out there who are obsessed with aprons? Neither did I, but I found blogs and websites dedicated just to aprons. One idea that really caught my attention was making aprons from other things - jeans and pillow cases. I then thought about how to add the decorations I wanted. At first I wanted to make floral fabrics but I got more interested in conversational fabrics - those which depict objects like tractors, bottles or in my case cleaning supplies! I also wanted to look at the different shapes and styles of aprons.
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| This is my sample board of apron shapes - all made in miniature! |
Now on to the life sized aprons!
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| This was my first apron - made from the back of a pair of jeans and decorated with cleaning cloth applique and angelina fibres. I completed it with a floral fabric frill and ties. |
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| If you're going to mdel an apron you might as well do it '50's housewife style! |
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| This apron features some of my own design of fabric, for the pockets. It's based on cleaning product bottles. I also used rick-rack braiding, gingham ribbon and lace trim. |
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| I used t-shirt transfer to add a picture of a cleaning lady that I'd drawn, with the words 'Mrs Mop waging war on dirt, grim and general household disorder.' I also used floral fabric for the frill and ties. |
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| This apron was printed on with a linocut, based on cleaning products and equipment. |
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| Tea anyone? |
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| This is my attempt at a repeating pattern, again based on cleaning products. I'm quite pleased with how it came out. |
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| Armed and dangerous! |
