Stitched in Time

Aprons from my life

Aprons come in all styles and fabrics, each stitched with memory and meaning. Lori's recent post about aprons reminded me just how powerful these simple garments can be.

Tied together with apron strings

Aprons bring back such great memories of Mom and Grandma and our time together in the kitchen. In the week before Christmas, I’d help Mom bake treats she packed in tins to gift to family and friends. There would be, to name a few, toffee bars, pinwheels, sugar cookies, peanut butter cookies, and chocolate chips. She’d be wearing, as always when she cooked or baked, her apron. This is one of them I still have.

Mom’s Apron

When I look closer, I see the time and care both she and Grandma put into creating these garments, meant only to protect “good” clothing. Their choice of fabric, the matching rickrack, and the snap or button closures all reveal their attention to detail.

Mom was not only a great cook and baker, but she was also an exceptional seamstress. However, she told me that she wasn't always that talented. By the time she sewed my clothes, her fourth child, she had refined her sewing skills. "You should have seen Martha's (the firstborn) clothes," she told me.

When I was in high school, we would go "shopping" for a new dress. I would find a lovely dress or outfit, but we'd leave empty-handed. However, a few days later, after she'd spent time with her Kenmore, she surprised me with my new dress that matched the one we had seen in the store. Whether it was a sleeveless summer dress or a velvet prom gown, she created a perfect copy. Although she often made clothing from memory, she also bought patterns. She’d make not just one dress from a pattern, but four or five in different fabrics. I always had plenty to wear, though at the time, I remember wishing for store-bought clothes. What was I thinking?

While Mom favored full aprons, Grandma (we called her Mayo) preferred the half apron. I can still picture her in the kitchen, rolling out the dough and stamping out her signature springerles. I don’t recall ever helping her bake, but I watched as she prepared those anise-flavored cookies and whipped up her cloud-like divinity. I didn’t care for the springerles back then, but the divinity truly was divine.

Mayo’s half aprons

Mayo made this one for me. It used to have a towel hanging down on the opposite side of the pocket. The pocket located on the left side identifies it as belonging to me because I’m left-handed!

My apron sewn just for me

I’ve continued their tradition of making aprons. I’ve sewn several for Dave using fabric from thrift stores and Hawaiian fabric. He is also a fantastic cook and baker. Here he is in the kitchen, making muffins.

Dave baking muffins wearing his thrift store fabric apron.

Over the years, for my art studio, I’ve made several aprons to keep the dyes and paints off my clothes. I used a painter's dropcloth to make an apron, and then with fabric paints, a stencil, and the sun, it ended up like this.

My painted and stamped drop cloth apron

For a silk scarf dyeing class I taught several years ago, I asked my good friend Barbara to join me as my assistant. I painted a couple of apron blanks for these aprons, adding our names so that the students could call out to us if they needed help.

Our aprons for the silk scarf dyeing class

In 2019, I needed a new apron for an upcoming dyeing workshop. I knew we’d be flinging a lot of dye. I chose a different apron blank and decorated it with paint and stamps. After that weeklong workshop, the apron was no longer pristine!

My stamped and printed apron

Though I rarely wear aprons in the kitchen, every time I tie one on in my dye studio, I feel their presence—Mom and Mayo, stitching and baking love into everything they touched.