Something old, something new

Final project of the first year, and I can't believe where the time has gone! This project was to take the 8 weeks of the summer term and was a two-part project - textiles and then our chosen pathway.
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.

This is my sample board of apron shapes - all made in miniature!

Now on to the life sized aprons!

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.

If you're going to mdel an apron you might as well do it '50's housewife style!

I'd used the back of the jeans but I had two legs left to use, so I made two more denim aprons.

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.

 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.

 I'd run out of jeans so decided to use pillow cases instead, as I'd seen a very easy apron pattern for this on the web.

This apron was printed on with a linocut, based on cleaning products and equipment.

Tea anyone?

This is my attempt at a repeating pattern, again based on cleaning products. I'm quite pleased with how it came out.

Armed and dangerous!