Painting Apron Presents

We are fortunate enough to live next door to some pretty lovely neighbors. The ones on the left have two girls and were very generous with hand-me-down clothes when Sophie was born. I've made them dresses for their birthdays in the past, but this year I thought I might go for something more practical. I've noticed the girls on the deck painting a bit, so some nice painting aprons seemed to fit the bill.

I got all excited and looked at online tutorials and found some old business shirts of my dad's in the stash that I could use. Hooray! Reusing old things to make fun new things! Unfortunately, I got so excited and carried away, that I had one finished apron and one cut-out-ready-to-sew apron before I remembered that the girls next door will be two and four years old this year. Here is the first one on the pedestal fan which is pretending to be a dress form.

As you can see, or guess rather, this painting apron is big enough to fit a child that is around ten years old. Not two years, or even four years. As I'd already cut out the second, I figured I may as well sew it up anyway and both aprons can be worn in about six to eight years time. Until then, they can either gather dust or maybe just be used as dress ups? I don't know.

In the end, I did make a smaller one for the two year old (because her birthday is in May) which can probably be worn fairly soonish. All in all, great sewing practice (bound the edges of the aprons with self made bias-binding and stitched on the girls first initials to the fronts), but rather disappointing result, given that they are pretty useless for a long time. Oh well.