The girls had a hoot making this Groovy Grandma apron for grandma Gloria's birthday this year.  I think I'll have to iron it before I give it to her -- I'm just looking at the photo as I type up these instructions and realize it's a tad creased.  *grin*   You can make a gardening or cooking apron (depending on which stencils you use).

As most regular visitors to the site know, I tend not to do crafts that require the purchase of a lot of supplies.  The exception to this rule is when the girls are doing crafts as gifts.  We still try to keep the supplies to a minimum (for example, in this project we made our own 'pencil lead stencil' templates instead of buying stencils) -- sometimes our grand gift plans don't work out quite as expected so we try to keep things inexpensive (we've had a few projects end up with the trash collectors instead of the intended recipients *laugh*).

We purchased the plain apron ($8 Canadian) and a set of 6 fabric markers ($15 Canadian) at our local craft store.  We used the markers (and the pencil lead templates) to make this apron for grandma, shoes for ourselves and a purse for our cousin and they're now safely squirreled away in the craft supply drawer for future projects (they'll likely dry out within 6 months or so whether we use them again or not).  Other projects I'm pondering using them for in the next little bit are a pillow case for Kaitlyn and a friend at a sleepover party and some Christmas napkins for "I'm not sure who yet".

Materials:

• plain white apron.
• fabric markers in whatever color you'd like.
• Printer and paper
• Pencil  (just the ordinary kind)

Instructions:

• Before you get started -- fabric markers stay on fabric... so wear old clothes and don't do this in the middle of the living room carpet *wink*
• Print out the template(s) of choice or design your own.  There's a wide variety of flowers, bugs and kitchen stencils to choose from.
• Cut the templates out in large squares and lay them around the apron to plan out your design.
• Turn the template OVER.  You should be able to faintly see the black lines through the paper.
• On a hard surface, color roughly everywhere you can see the template outline through the paper.
• And now you have a "pencil lead template"!

• Lay the "pencil lead template" on the apron where you want the image to show up.
• Again, on a hard surface, draw a firm single pencil line over the template.  When you lift the paper, the pencil lead you colored on the back will be transferred onto the apron as a light image.

• Use your fabric markers to trace over top of the stencil lines.
• Feel free to color in any areas you want after you transfer all of your images to the apron.
• You can add hand-drawn dots, swirls, hearts, flowers, etc to make things fancier as well.  (little daisies on the teapot, for example, are quite nice!)

"Groovy Grandma" Templates:

black and white

black and white

black and white

black and white

black and white

black and white

black and white

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