So how often does it happen that you’re all dumbfounded for gift ideas? Massaging slippers are sort of dumb, retro Anchor Hocking highball glasses on ebay are crazy expensive, and Chia Pets are inedible and therefore even worse than light-up yo-yos. Am I right?

So I decided for the most recently completed Round O’ Holidays that I would make all kinds of things for people: quilts, pajama pants, holiday napkins, slippers, aprons, slipcovers for various appliances and/or items of furniture, bathrobes, jaunty little scarves, and so on. And while I do enjoy some aspects of holiday mayhem, more often than not I bake a couple different kinds of cookies, in plans of gift-giving on the personalized and cheaper end of the spectrum, and then eat myself into a mild sugar coma while watching cartoons on the tee vee. Alas, the end of 2006 was no different - at least, almost no different. I did make a couple things, of which I was pretty proud and were well received, but it wasn’t as much as I’d reckoned on. One item which wasn’t whipped up in time for xmas/new year’s, but was whipped up eventually, was The Morgan Apron.

I originally intended to make this as an xmas/seasonal/new year’s present for my good friend, Morgan, but it kept getting pushed back. Luckily, the month of March saw her moving into a swell new place with her lovely gf *and* her birthday, so a convenient subsitute of gift-worthy dates arose. Lucky me!
Anyway, back when it was supposed to be a December-gift, I asked Beth (the lovely gf) if she thought an apron would be a good gift, and she was all OH YES. TOTALLY SHE WOULD LOVE IT. And I followed up with, Well, what kind of apron? And I don’t think she said “funky,” but that was the subtext I picked up on. I bet she said colorful, fun, maybe crazy, but definitely not faux fur and oilcloth . Yet therein lies the beauty of subtext, gentle readers; without it every performance of The Glass Menagerie would be sterile and predictable. And perhaps without it, also, Morgan would’ve gotten a very nice apron for sure, but it may not’ve been half made up of inch-deep thick pile bright blue fuzzy-wuzz, with the opposite side wiping clean for splatters of tomato sauce and strawberry milkshakes.

The most fun part was probably the idea hatching stage, because how often, really, do you get to buy kelly green satin blanket binding and bright blue depp-pile fake fur in the same shopping trip? It went together relatively easily, though there’s always room for improvement and/or creative variation. Check out http://www.flickr.com/photos/carbonated/sets/72157600052316992/ for lots of pictures of the Morgan Apron Makin’ Process.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 9th, 2007 at 4:07 pm and is filed under Crafty Pants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.