Aprons

I remember making a white apron in Clothing 1 to wear in Home Ecomony 1. It was an easy project and came after making your gym bag both with your name embroidered on them for the teacher to know who you were. The apron was white so it stayed spotless while I learned to cook. I took 3 years of sewing in High School and loved it all the way including tailoring. Sewing certainly was a life saver for me so that I could look like my millionaire Bel Aire peers at West Los Angeles' University High School for pennies - which was all I had to their millions.

My mother and grandmother wore aprons and used them as stated below. There are stories of my great grandmother Mary Ann Maltsberger Jones and her apron. She was the mother of ten children who all lived to be adults. Her husband was paralysed in 1886 and did not work after that accident in his stone quarry. My father was 11 and his older brother was 13 years old when their slavery, as he called it, began. They were sent to work with a rancher who worked them HARD for 12 hours or more a day. The small amount of money they made was sent to their mother to help support the family. Mary Ann took in boarders from the train station across the street and did wash to raise the other resources needed. It was a busy house full of noise for this godly woman. When things got to be too much for her, she would go into the front yard and throw the skirt of the apron over her head to pray and calm her heart.

Mary Ann had a wealthy younger sister who invited her to visit her in West Texas. She took the train for the trip and as she was reboarding the train at the end of the visit her sister confessed that she had been afraid that Mary Ann, as a poor woman with so many children, would prove to be an embrassment to her social standing with her lack of education. Mary Ann had been forced into marriage by her father when she was 14 years old. Her sister asked how Mary Ann had learned to speak so well, with such an impressive vocabulary and knowledge of so many things. Mary Ann quietly responded that her knowledge and vocabulary came from her daily reading of the Bible and her relationship with Christ.

Here is a piece I received on the internet that brought back memories for me.

The History of Aprons

I don't think our kids know what an apron is.

The principal use of Grandma's apron was to protect the dress underneath,because she only had a few,it was easier to wash aprons than dresses and they used less material, but along with that, it served as a potholder for removing hot pans from the oven and stove.

It was wonderful for drying children's tears, and on occasion was even used for cleaning out dirty ears.

From the chicken coop, the apron was used for carrying eggs, fussy chicks, and sometimes half-hatched eggs to be finished in the warming oven.

When company came, those aprons were ideal hiding places for shy kids. And when the weather was cold, grandma wrapped it around her arms. Those big old aprons wiped many a perspiring brow, bent over the hot wood stove.

Chips and kindling wood were brought into the kitchen in that apron. From the garden, it carried all sorts of vegetables. After the peas had been shelled, it carried out the hulls. In the fall, the apron was used to bring in apples that had fallen from the trees.

When unexpected company drove up the road, it was surprising how much furniture that old apron could dust in a matter of seconds.

When dinner was ready, Grandma walked out onto the porch, waved her apron, and the men knew it was time to come in from the fields to dinner.

It will be a long time before someone invents something that will replace that ' old-time apron' that served so many purposes.

REMEMBER:

Grandma used to set her hot baked apple pies on the window sill to cool. Her granddaughters set theirs on the window sill to thaw. They would go crazy now trying to figure out how many germs was on that apron. I don't think I ever caught anything from an Apron.