Fashionable old-fashioned apron styles (1911)
The Day Book (Chicago, IL) December 23, 1911
The young wife who has just “moved in” to her new dove-cote and is to “do” her own work should have a number of big loose pinafores. These should be made large enough to envelop her when dressed in her best, and yet is doing active service in life kitchen..
These aprons may be long-sleeved and high-necked, or cut low and demi-sleeves, according to her needs and fancy.
The clever young woman who is doing her own work and who also likes to look pretty, dresses herself carefully for dinner, and then puts on a big apron to prepare it.
A pretty model that a young bride had several aprons fashioned after is made kimono shape. These are of pink Chambray and loose enough to be slipped on and off in a jiffy. They are trimmed with embroidered bands and have a useful, if wee, bit of a pocket.
Please your husband and don an apron
Dress-up afternoon aprons are fashioned after many styles and of varied materials. Scrim, lawn, linen and organdy are used their construction. They may be much trimmed and ruffled, according to the clever fingers manipulating them, and, the taste of the wearer.
Hand crochet lace and daisies done in cross-stitch is the work upon a cream-colored scrim apron. The lace is inserted and is inside of the narrow hem, and then edging finishes it. The daisies are done in yellow, white and green and decorate the lower part of the apron and the straps that go over the shoulders.
A cunning closed pocket or bag in which to tuck a handkerchief is the feature of a white lawn apron. This has a lace insertion that is fancifully arranged in bow knots and outlines the apron.
A coquettish lawn, one which would please the most fastidious of men, has three rows of lace around it and a kerchief-shaped shoulder piece and collar. Pale blue satin bows decorate it.
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Vintage apron styles (1905)
Beautiful products of the needle which the busy girl is turning out for the holiday season
The St. Louis Republic (St. Louis, Mo.) November 12, 1905
Aprons are already beginning to play an important part with the girl who in deep in Christmas work. With her prettiest one on. She is making up a pile of them — big weekday kinds, and airy, fluffy bits of beauty that seem too fragile to have a bit of use in them, yet protect dress and sewing wonderfully well.
It’s the most domestic of all the pretty little feminine touches the putting on of an apron for sewing, or for chafing-dish cookery, or for arranging flowers.
Like everything else, hand embroidery (and handwork generally) is being lavished on the prettiest of them, sometimes taking the form of heavy, exquisitely worked initials; and, as often, expressing itself in tiny vines with wee flowers and tendrils twisting into graceful designs.
Dimities and lawns and organdies, mulles and Swisses — all the sheer, beautiful summer stuffs — lend themselves as graciously to the flyaway bits, and are made up with ruffles of lace, or of the material, or of both, deftly caught together.
One, made in three deep points, with a fourth for a miniature bib, had division lines of lace which were echoed on the bib. The original was of Paris muslin, with the points embroidered in motifs of grapes, while the lace was the German valenciennes so popular for everything in lingerie fashions.
But a flowered muslin could be used, and would make light work of the handwork (if it’s only your “second-best girl” you’re doing it for!) or medallions of embroidery or lace — especially the interesting medallions of filet net with a design darned in.
Japanese embroidery
Strips and medallions of Japanese embroidery make an unusual and extremely pretty apron. But whatever you trim it with, let your ruffle be of the material — unadorned. The apron in itself is trimmed too much to have other than the simplest sort of ruffle by way of setting it off.
An apron with a deep pocket is mighty satisfactory for fancy work — for any kind of sewing, in fact; for into the pocket go scissors and thimble and spools of cotton — all the numerous little things that have such aggravating way of dropping on the floor and losing themselves at critical moments.
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Some of these pocket aprons are made by cutting the apron long, and turning it up a good six inches, stitching it down in three or four places, making it into divisions. But a more novel kind, and one more satisfactory in a general way, is to make an apron and a skeleton-apron, sewing them together at the outer edges, and binding the inner edge of the skeleton with ribbon.
Simple but beautiful
The heavier linens, especially the art linens which come in such soft, exquisite shades, make simpler, but no less beautiful, aprons. Some of them are made somewhat circular in shape, and are outlined with a great scallop padded and embroidered in heavy embroidery cotton, with initials or monogram embroidered on the bib.
Art linens, with a deep hemstitch and initials embroidered on, are as stunning, if less unusual, in their way.
Violets and greens are the prettiest embroidered in white, or in a shade that matches the linen exactly, or a deeper tone of the same shade.
As to workaday aprons, they have been juggled with and trimmed up in pretty, tailory ways until they — some of them — are actually pretty. They are made with long sleeves or sleeveless, according to whim, but all of them have bibs shaped in odd, interesting styles; and the most satisfactory of them are blessed with capacious pockets.
Percales — those with gay little figures printed on a white ground — ginghams, chambrays, chintzes and calicoes are all satisfactory materials to make them of.
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