The Infinitely Ruffled 1780s Apron

This apron – Infinitely Ruffled 1780s Apron – began all the way back in 2018.  It was my second project out of the American Duchess dressmaking book. I had made aprons, but at that point I hadn’t much experience with hand rolling hems, and this apron – well, this apron had a lot of rolled hems. There were 3 yards in the apron body, 6 yards up one side of the ruffle  and 6 back down the other side.  Just thinking about it, I needed a fainting couch and a handsome gentleman to sponge my temples. At my slow, painstaking rate of rolled hemmery, 15 yards of hem felt like miles.

I started with optimism – mostly at night, in front of the television, where I didn’t have to think of the miles and miles and MILES of hem (the estimate grew, exponentially, with every stitch) and I worked on it on and off, and on and off,  and on, and on, and ON – I came to think of it as the Infinite Apron : when I was feeling down and like life had no meaning, I’d pull out this horrible apron and confirm that I was right.

Then 2020 happened.  Circumstances saw me stuck outside of Chile for 18 months, where I sewed – and hemmed – other things.  Uncertain, unmoored, waiting for vaccines and badly missing Mr Tabubil, I sewed for my sanity’s sake: caps, fichus, mantelets, wrapping gowns, petticoats – I seamed, I gathered, I whipped, and I hemmed –  Practice brought experience, and eventually expertise, and somewhere in the middle of it all – rolled hemming changed from proof of the dreary infinite to something that was fun.

When I finally made it home to Chile in 2021, I pulled out the horrible infinite apron and found that as a project, it had become benign. It had become something almost small. So I finished it. I took that heap of half-hemmed voile, I unpicked my laboriously bungled whip-gathers, and then I sat back, cracked an anticipatory grin –

I re-whipped my ruffles. I tacked them down. I stroke-gathered the waist to a band, and then I stopped, and looked for a bit, and I took some vast and serious pleasure in the formal, measured beauty of the strokes. 

This infinitely ruffled apron had become metaphorical as hell.  I felt existential whiplash with every step.

Until there it was – the infinitely ruffled 1780s apron.  I liked it so much, I made another one.

Here’s an apron. Take two. I can HEM, you see. I hemmed around the world and back.  Sometimes, looking at those lonely, drifting 18 months, I feel like I hemmed my way home.