I am a maker who does her best work in a T-shirt over leggings. But I need my gear on my person.
Two styles, many uses: Above, a short version offers great mobility when working in the garden without the danger of dropping the phone when bending over. At right, a longer apron provides more coverage as well as extra room for gloves, dishtowels -- extra handy for cooking, berry-picking or foraging.
Free Store doilies are used to bleach-transfer lacy patterns on denim.
At one point in the day I might be swinging that canvas-stretcher tool, staple gun and pliers. Later it might be a Sharpie, pencil and a graph-paper notebook for all my scheming. When I'm hanging with Bernina, I need my small scissors, seam-rippers, rotary cutter, tailor's chalk and magnet for the pins that fall like confetti as I work. When I go outside it's work gloves and snippers and when the kitchen calls, it's my cooking apron.
Even without a pricetag, donated jeans at the Free Store end up in the island dump.
But if I'm going to be honest, this design all started with my smartphone. Like many makers I know, I fill my head with music as I work, and need the camera function to capture those moments of inspiration. Is it too vain to want the thing that holds all the things to be an attractive garment? Hell no. Function may have inspired this form, but form takes no back seat in my world. I will not wear a dorky hold-everything toolbelt-apron that is the garment equivalent of the Homer-mobile.
Discarded denim garments are washed and line-dried before the fabric is reclaimed, leaving little to compost.
But I wanted something durable, with lots of long pockets so my gear doesn't fall out when I bend down to pick up a handful of parsley or mark out a mosaic.
The easy way out of that was to score an old pair of jeans from the Free Store here on Lasqueti Island, a mecca for makers. Thanks to the advice of a fine local maker of everything from men's custom dress shirts to boat sails, I found I could recreate the durability of jeans by sewing 'flat fell seams', like the double seams in jeans, so this apron could take a beating but hold up wash after wash.
I test-drove my first Work Wrap ("for all your work crap!", suggested a friend, whose profession is, in fact, marketing) and soon found myself making versions for others on the island, and Vancouver, and Victoria... and, well, the rest is history.
I'll keep making Work Wraps until I run out of free jeans to upcycle, innovating as I go. This is a one-woman operations so if there are none available here, keep checking back — or send me a nudge through the order form.