I made something pretty and then I decided to destroy it. That's sometimes how it goes for me. This is sort of a before and after and then after again story. Here's how it goes...
I had a chance to play with the canvas apron that Donna Downey designed for Prima. It's a plain off-white apron made from canvas. There's a pocket in the center and a ruffle at the bottom. It's pretty stiff and resists water quite a bit.
I decided I wanted to give my apron a pattern. So, I used a black Permapaque marker from Sakura to draw a simple design.
Originally, I was planning to fill the entire bottom half with flowers, but honestly, I got tired of drawing flowers. So I decided to just go ahead and move on to color. I added Adirondack Color Wash from Ranger and left it in the shower to dry:
As a side benefit, the water in the Adirondack Color Wash got the creases out of the apron. As a negative, you do have to scrub your grout with bleach to get the Color Wash out of it.
While the apron was drying, I dyed some lace ribbon with Adirondack Color Wash. I didn't have a single ribbon that was long enough for what I wanted, but I did have one gray and one off-white ribbon that were the same style. So I dyed them to match each other. I simply put the ribbon, some water, and some Color Wash in a bag and shook it all around.
Then I stitched on all of my embellishments, added a bit of white paint and decided that my apron was done! I took it outside to photograph.
You can see that I stitched the ribbon all along that jagged dividing mark. However, I did want the pockets to be usable. So I used Fabri-Tac to attach it over the pocket area (stitching would have closed that pocket right up) and stitching for the rest. I broke two needles in the process (those little plastic pearls got me!), but I like the look! You can just see in the photo below where I snipped the ribbon to allow access into the pocket.
Below, you can see a close up of a paper flower stitched in place and a beautiful sequin center on top of it (glued on).
And here's a peek at the texture of the canvas with the paint and marker:
This apron is super feminine, and very pretty. But something about it just didn't feel like "me." I sat staring at the pictures and decided to go ahead and destroy it. Here's the apron at the "finished" pretty point:
I sprayed some Adirondack Color Wash across the top of the apron, added water and let it drip.
In the photo above you can also see that I added some acrylic paint circles - both with a dabber and with a toilet paper tube. I used a pencil eraser to add even more circles in the photo below, as well as some stamped flourishes (they're red and green and a bit harder to see with everything that is going on).
And then I added some stenciled leaves.
And a few stamped branches of flowers (indicated with the white arrows in the photo below).
As you can see below, I went back in and added more dots of all kinds and more color.
As a final step, I painted over the black words with white paint.
And here's my brand new apron:
So which do you like better? Pretty or gritty?
Let me know!
