DIY gardening apron

Where aprons in the Netherlands are currently described as the most fetish style icons of all times, I was just trying to find a good and functional apron to wear in the garden. Carrying seeds, shovels, telephone and all kind of attributes while working in the mud isn’t very easy if you don’t have a lot of pockets and soon I will also have to carry a harvest! As most women, I generally don’t have a lot of pockets and if I have them, they are often only there for decoration purposes. So I really needed pockets!

And so I did some research, collected these aprons as inspiration and dug through my old stashes of fabric. I found this black cloth that originates from very loved pants that I wore many times in the past. As most things that you wear often, they eventually became old and I only kept pieces that were usable for future projects. Projects that I normally don’t have time to work out, but now I had! So old fabric scraps pile – be warned – soon you won’t exist anymore! Next to this darker fabric I used a sturdy vintage yellow fabric that I used earlier as well. And at the same vintage shopping stop I also found these perfectly matching flowers at that time which I also hadn’t used yet, so I decided to do the lining with them, to brighten it up a bit.

And then the creating began. I didn’t use a pattern, one because I thought probably I had to make the apron custom in size anyway due to my hips.  Briefly the thought came in my mind that if the word hipster had any relation to the size of hips, I would be the hippest of hipsters. But it doesn’t I believe. ;) Two because it was just a rectangular piece of fabric with some smaller pieces of rectangular pieces of fabric attached to it. That didn’t seem to difficult to do without a pattern.

So inspired by all the aprons I found I decided what kind of pockets I would want and what kind of things I could fabricate with my very basic sewing skills and started cutting and sewing. And 1,5h (divided over two days) later I was finished this morning. I just can’t say how much I love it. It’s just perfect (to my standards, which are low based on my very limited sewing skills ;)). If you are also just pulling this out of your own sleeve without a pattern, just remember to apply the pockets on the apron at the right time, so that you can enjoy the empty spaces in the pockets and won’t run into stitchings half way through.

And this is how it looks flat out. It’s very functional, can’t wait to try it out now in the garden. I made it with three pockets, one very big one for weeding stuff and for harvesting and then two smaller ones for carrying seeds or a telephone. A tiny one for – aghum – decoration purposes. And then I have a two spaces (a small and a big one) where I can hang a tool or something else I would need, that’s the yellow thing up there.

I believe I’m becoming less afraid of mr. Singer, what next? Any good simple / useful projects you could advise me to pick up?