Embroidery with Vintage Apron Pockets, Watercolor Pencils and Crayons

A friend had given me an old apron with nice embroidery work on the edges and pockets. The linen was well worn, and the threads were thin, so they would not hold up well to further stitching. But I wanted to preserve the vintage handwork, embellish it a bit further and incorporate that pocket piece into something which I am currently sewing. More information was given about vintage cloth here in a previous post.

So I cut out those pockets from the old apron to save them, adding an iron-on stiffening product called Wonder Under to the back of the pockets.

Fast forward a couple of days. In order to also preserve some of the old handwork already on those two pockets, I decided to find a retro looking picture which would incorporate that prior flower stitching into my new project (see upper left side of woman's scarf in the photo below for the vintage handwork). The white embroidery originally there on the pocket is difficult to see in the photo.

The dilemma was that the apron pockets were white, and the new fabric onto which they would be sewn had no coordinating white in the fabric.

How about making a yellow background for the pocket? That's the ticket! So I tinted the white fabric pocket with a mixture of yellow and orange crayon overlays (just coloring the background like you would color on a piece of paper).

Giggleface is the most thorough source I found in searching out ways to tint fabrics with crayons. An excellent tutorial is given there and is also the website where I learned how to color the pink for breast cancer ribbons on old handerchiefs in a previous post.

That same site also had a cute Roaring 20's face of a woman which would work perfectly for the pocket application. The face of the woman came from a pattern from Vintage-Tinted-Linens.

I also colored the flapper's scarf with watercolor pencils and crayons, and rouged her cheeks with the same products. (Full credit for the application of the colors of threads and techniques goes to Giggleface.)

Then I made two faces of the woman on two separate pockets, similarly embroidered, for my future project. Stay tuned into this blogspot and the project will be shown when completed.

Look to needlenthread for a video library of hand embroidery instructions in case you need a refresher course in all the hundreds of stitches that can be employed in embroidery.

Curiously Old Patterns is an extensive site for embroidery patterns over 120 years old, and is in the public domain. These images can be used without fear of copyright infringement.

This may give you an idea to get out those needles and embroidery floss long packed away, and have fun embroidering on a new project! It is definitely a handcraft which is coming back into favor.