Ham - burger

No, this has not turned into a food blog – it could, but it hasn’t.  This is all about an apron.  My son’s Christmas present, to be exact.  Christmas-present-making time was coming up, and this pattern came up on my radar because of a class that was being taught at the store.  The pattern being used was by Harebrained Happenings.

They have the cutest applique patterns for, among other things, aprons.  For aprons there are a possible 4 choices of picture.  An apron – the perfect present for a chef.  But I could not decide on which picture, so instead of this all being a great secret until the mailman arrived, I e-mailed son-chef with a link to the patterns and had him chose.  I was leaning towards the Hamburger myself, but I did want to be sure (that’s a lot of work to put in, and if it’s not quite right, you know …), and, as is often the case – we think alike.   So Hamburger was on the menu.  Sewing an apron is no great feat, but choosing fabrics for an applique picture – good heavens – it takes forever!  For starters, the pig has to be the right colour.  Then you need the bun to be the right colour, and it has to look good next to the pig.  And then the red has to be just so, the green ….  You get the picture.  At some point you just have to make decisions and go with it.  (This is so, so much worse that picking fabrics for an outfit!!)  There was lots of tracing of fiddly stuff, cutting of fiddly stuff.  Most of all (for some bizarre reason) I was dreading the blanket stitching around every single little applique piece.  And that certainly takes a whole lot less time on the machine than it does by hand, so I have no idea why I was even worrying my brain about it.  I toyed with the idea of doing machine embroidery for “Ham burger” under the picture, but that would have required bringing the apron in to the store, spending some amount of time at figuring it all out, etc., etc.  In the end, I decided to just embroider the word by hand, and I’m quite sure that the amount of time spent was much, much less than it would have taken me by machine.

I did alter the actual apron pattern a little.  I found it a bit wide at the top in the larger size, so I narrowed it.  And the pockets got stitched down after all the layers were together (this apron has a lining).  (Made more sense to me - to keep things from flapping around when that apron goes into the wash.)  I have been promised a picture of “apron being worn”, but at this point, I’m not holding my breath.  I do receive random pictures of new bikes, trucks, food on plates, food in ovens, but for some reason the face that I do want to see in those pictures is rarely there.