Everyone in this household is now cooking or baking regularly. Alone among us, Adrian had no apron that fit him.

Store-bought aprons aren’t quite one size fits all, but nearly: there are two sizes on the market instead of one. Kids’ aprons are sized for kids aged 4 to 6 or thereabouts, and the ones we had are now way too small for Adrian. Adult-sized ones are still way too large.

What does one do? Make one, of course!

I like easy sewing projects like this. No worrying about fit, just have fun. And it takes no more than a few hours to get done.

Adrian made the design, I made it happen.

He had a very clear idea of what his apron should look like, with colourful appliques of fruit and vegetables (and an egg) and cooking utensils. Most of them he chose, I think, because they look cool – he doesn’t even really eat avocados – but the cucumber got pride of place because it is his favourite vegetable.

We later replaced the orange with a carrot, because it’s hard to make an orange not look like an orange-coloured ball, and had to skip most of the utensils because we couldn’t fit them into the space we had. We switched from pink to blue because we couldn’t find a sturdy fabric in the kind of dusky pink he had in mind. But the final result is pretty close to the original design.

Functionally, the apron has three tweaks that I wish all my aprons had as well.
One: no pocket. I’ve never used any of the pockets on my aprons – all they do is get in the way and get dirty.
Two: ties of generous length. Both Adrian and I like taking the ties all the way around the waist and tying the knot in the front.
Three: neck strap adjustable using snaps instead of rings. Non-adjustable neck straps suck; I’ve ended up tying ugly hard knots in some to make them fit. And D-rings always end up slipping. Watching Master Chef on TV, I noticed that they had snaps instead. Of course that’s the way to go!