Happy Mother's Day!

For Mother's Day this year, I decided to make an apron for my mom because she loves to cook for her family and friends. Her specialties include pots of slow-simmered Chinese soup, antioxidant-rich "smoothies" that usually include questionable things like bitter melon and tomatoes (she used to offer these to Dean when we were dating and he'd have to down them with a straight face...poor guy!), and an assortment of Cantonese and Vietnamese dishes that my sister and I have since tried to learn.

I used a pattern out of the Martha Stewart Encyclopedia of Sewing and Fabric Crafts to sew the apron out of some linen I had on hand. I shortened and scaled it down a bit since my mom is pretty petite.

Then, I used my Silhouette SD cutter to cut out the images of a soup pot, blender, and wok on freezer paper. I ironed the freezer paper directly onto the apron, which created a seal so the paint wouldn't seep through. At this point, I realized I didn't have a single paintbrush in the house! Fittingly, I ended up using a kitchen sponge to dab the paint over the stenciled images, which surprisingly worked out okay. I let it sit overnight and then peeled the stencil off the next morning, put it in an envelope, and shipped it off to Portland for my mom!

Happy Mother's Day, Mom!