The vintage victory apron

When I haven’t been busy with homeschooling/mom life this year, one of my big projects this year has been following along with a vintage skill-building challenge of sorts. So I’ve been learning how to do things like canning and making sourdough bread. In addition, my husband and I have been getting into gardening over the past two years, which has been a great mutual hobby for us. And it’s been an interesting challenge to see how much food we can cram into a townhouse yard.

It’s still TBD how much we’ll actually harvest. But since it looks like we might get a decent number of tomatoes, and I’ve been scrambling for bowls when needing to pick from our blueberry bushes, I needed something to use for harvesting. So I found a tutorial of sorts for a WWII- era “basket apron”. The idea is that it uses drawstrings to turn it into a giant hands-free pouch. I figured that Doug would like that it folds up smaller than a basket, too!

This ended up being a good stashbusting project for me. The main part of it is a green denim left over from some chair cushions that my mom had made years ago. She gave the rest to me with the thought of little boy pants, but my boys really only like to wear knit pants. The lining was a gift from one of my church/book club friends, who gave me a bag of quilt cotton pieces that she’d had sitting around for years. The greens matched perfectly! And the drawstrings were part of a pack that I bought when making Hudson pants a few years ago. Not the best match since they’re white. I thought about tea staining them, but I figure the odds of them getting naturally dirt-stained are good.

Aside from the drawstrings, it looks like a normal apron. The pocket was my addition. I figure it’ll give me a place to put the blueberries next year. (We only have two bushes, so it was really a handful at a time.)

And here it is, all tied up into its “basket” form. A second addition here was making some belt loops from the print to anchor the ties. I probably should have interfaced them, but they are quadruple topstitched, so that’s something.

And then the fruits and veggies just sit in here.

Overall, I found this to be a satisfying project. The most time consuming part was that I ended up hand-reinforcing the eyelets. So now it’s just waiting for green tomatoes to ripen so I can really test it out!

Just for fun, one of my very few successful sunflowers. I planted a whole pack, but only 2 came up because it’s a terrible spot for weeding and they choked my flowers out.