I have a lot of dreams. One of them is of me enjoy­ing a big stu­dio in the house, where I spend lovely hours design­ing fab­rics, meters and meters of them, then print­ing them and sort­ing them out to send to my extremely (of course) happy and sat­is­fied cus­tomers. In my dream I am very good at it and the room is abun­dant in col­or­ful graphic fab­rics and big work­ing tables.

Now back to real­ity, in which I have never done any such thing, short of doing hand prints with the kids on a t-shirt for Mr.Blab for fathers day.  The kids have been ask­ing for aprons, ever since I said I had thought of giv­ing them some as Christmas presents.  Cause they would not get that idea from just watch­ing me. I seem to have no prob­lem with the  wip­ing of food and gunk on my clothes while cook­ing. And I wipe a lot. Kind of in a daze. Maybe that is why they asked for aprons…to save them­selves from end­ing up like me! With gunky pants.

Then I found this cal­ico fab­ric, which seemed per­fect for some print­ing play. And we went for it. We started doing the fab­ric making.

The kids chose their designs. Ms.Fab wanted to do cher­ries, so she cut off two cir­cles on one sten­cil and the stems on another. Then she chose the col­ors and off she went.

Little B wanted an ele­phant. I was all pre­pared to draw this lovely spec­i­men we have on a growth chart, but she insisted on doing it her­self. So she did. And she drew the best ele­phant I have ever seen. I shall call him Elvis Elephant, as he looks like he has some wild styl­ish hair, dude.  I cut up the sten­cil and off she went.

Then the fab­ric dries for entirely too long accord­ing to a child’s time perceptions.

And here comes my part, just in case you thought I am just a lowly pho­tog­ra­pher in this story, not an actual con­trib­u­tor to beauty and aes­thet­ics. I whipped out the saw­ing machine and turned the fab­ric the girls cre­ated into aprons. With frills!

I am no great saw­ing god­dess. I dont use pat­terns and/or plans. It all hap­pens in some sort of a cre­ative mind blur. I have a gen­eral idea of what I am try­ing to do and then hope it works in prac­tice as it per­fectly does in my head. It rarely does, but I get close.

And there you have it.

It was so much fun, I want to do it again. But this time I want to be mak­ing the print­ing and designing.

I won­der what can I make out of the fabric…new pants probably?

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