my first apron

I made my first apron!

This was a really quick and easy sort of endeavor. Mostly. You see, there's a recurring apron challenge that I've wanted to participate in for a while now. It's called Tie One On and every other month or so, the gal who runs the site picks a theme and you can make an apron according to that theme. This month's theme was polka dots. I love polka dots. I've secretly loved them for years, but felt like it just wasn't cool to admit that. Same with Martha Stewart Living magazine. I felt like I wasn't an edgy graphic designer if I liked that mag. I finally gave up and got a subscription and buy myself polka dotted things all the time. Judge me. I don't care anymore.

So this one was fun because it was kind of a multi-media apron. I didn't want to buy new fabric to make it, but didn't have any in my stash with dots quite so large. So I painted the dots on by hand with some acrylic paint mixed with fabric medium. That was so fun and relaxing. I love painting. I should do it more often.

Then as the paint was drying, I doodled up a tea kettle that I wanted on the pocket. I would love to claim to some sort of free-style doodling straight on the fabric, but I am a little too anal for that. So I sketched it out in Illustrator first (I love Illustrator. I do everything in Illustrator.) and also knocked up a sketch of the apron so I could see how big I wanted the tea kettle drawing to be on the apron. I love using illustrator this way to mock up things that I make. It saves me so much time, it's awesome! Then I printed up the doodle from Illustrator and taped it to my lightbox (what you don't have one?) and taped the fabric for the pocket over it. Turn on the lightbox, trace with a sharpie and then you are done.

Once the paint for the polka dots was completely dried, I ironed it and the sharpie drawing too. I was hoping that the heat would set the ink and paint. I haven't washed any of this yet so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that everything set. I've used this fabric medium before on shirts and it worked out fine and I tested the sharpie on a bit of scrap canvas fabric so I think it will be okay. I'm feeling pretty nonchalant about it actually.

I really like creating things in this kind of setting. It reminds me of my favorite graphic design class taught by my favorite graphic design instructor Carl Heinz. Every week, Carl would give us an assignment and we had to come back the following week with our interpretation of the assignment. He would show us slides of some examples of work that illustrated his point, but mostly those were for inspirations. We were given free reign to come up with whatever we wanted. Most of the students were graphic designers or design students so they mostly turned in a website design or a brochure or a bookcover design based on the weekly theme. Sometimes you'd get a fine arts student or a fashion designer and once even a baker who'd take the theme and interpret it in the medium they knew best. The baker brought in a loaf of bread with a logo "stamped" on the top. She'd designed the logo in an art decoratif style. Brilliant.

In fact, I'll try and dig up some of my projects. A fun little blast from the past and post some of the images here.