FO: Embroidered Apron

On Saturday afternoon I pulled my little embroidery kit out of the closet and made my plain cotton canvas apron into something a bit more exciting! I started with a pretty simple design in one corner, and I might decide to add a few more flowers around the border later.  For now, it's minimal but has a lot more character than it did before.

The flowers let me try out three different embroidery stitches, from a detached chain for the petals to a simple running stitch for the spiral centers, to a split stitch for the stems and geometric leaves.  I made a few flubs when I first tried the detached chain, but I figured it out eventually.  There are also a few french knots clustered around the base of the stems to look like grass.

Sometimes the best part of working on a project like this is playing around with the different colors of floss, trying out neat combinations to see what works (like the brown and blue below) and what doesn't (like the turquoise and yellow - ick).

Obviously I'm partial to pretty blues, paired or on their own, and that definitely influenced my choices for the "Hello" banner.

For that section, I used one of my Sublime Stitching iron-on transfers, from the Black Apple pattern set.  I completed all the stitching while watching a couple episodes of True Blood season 3.  Hooray for summer tv marathons!

Finally, I took an iron to the back of the apron. The ironing was probably the most difficult part of the whole project, only because it was the least enjoyable stage of the process on a warm Saturday afternoon.  I had my living room box fan running the whole time, but an iron on a cotton setting still gives off a lot of heat. This shot is from before I did anything about the many many ends hanging out on the back.

 And here's another view of the finished item.  I'm so glad I took the time to do this mini project, because now I have something cute to wear when I'm cooking in the hot, hot kitchen this summer. Hopefully adding a bit of style to my food prep will help convince me that dealing with the heat is worth it.