This is an apron I made for Mom this week. It's made an out-of-print Simplicity pattern (the price on the pattern envelope is $3.00, which gives you some idea how old it is) and possibly-vintage fabric for the outside, both unearthed in The Family Attic and given to me a couple of years ago, the stipulation being that I make Mom an apron or two and the rest of the fabric was mine to do with as I please. (A good deal, too, since there are probably two yards left, easily.)
The pattern doesn't call for a lining; it's just bound with bias tape on all the edges, but I wanted to cover up the back of my embroidery (I'm tidier than I used to be, but it still isn't anything to show off). The lining fabric I bought at Hancock for something like $2.50 a yard off the sale table. The neck binding is a scrap of bias tape left from something else, dug out of the "odds and ends of bias tape, rickrack, etc." box.
Bear closeup: the embroidery was done with DMC floss in stem stitch, mostly. Pattern is from Indygo Junction's book Storybook Stitches, Book II—Bunnies and Bears. We both liked this one because the pattern resembles the illustrations for Little Brown Bear and the Patty Pan, a story in one of the John Martin's Big Books for Little Folks (first copyrighted in the late teens/early 20s). They belonged to Mom and her sister when they were small, and now they are mine, and much loved still. There was a slew of them, from what I can tell, but I only have the first seven. (I'd love to have some others, but they're going for $50 or so apiece on eBay, so I suppose I'll have to live without them.) Apparently the first editions had colored illustrations pasted on the board covers, but mine have red covers with the same blue line drawing on them all. In fact, I knew them as "the big red books" until I was nearly grown.
As an aside—I'm not positive what age they were produced for, but I began reading them as soon as I learned to read, and they are one of the things that shaped my reading habits. (These, and Collier's Junior Classics, which came with a 1950 set of Collier's Encyclopedias. I promised my original copies to Emma, but then my brother turned up a complete set in much better condition at Goodwill for $1 a volume, so I gave those to her and mine are still here with me.) They contain a hodgepodge of stories (some of them not at all PC), poems, songs, nature studies, history, fairy tales, children-of-foreign lands stories, riddles, craft projects (painted macaraoni necklaces, etc.), none of which have the simple vocabulary of today's children's books. I still find them fascinating . . . but I do wish I hadn't colored so many of the illustrations. Or that I'd stayed inside the lines a little better, at least.
