Bernice Rider didn’t start collecting aprons until the mid-1990s, but with about 150 aprons collected, the 92-year-old has made up for lost time.
Rider said a 1994 Capper’s Weekly newspaper story about a traveling apron show in Logan piqued her interest. Though she couldn’t make it to the show, she investigated further, made a few calls and began her own apron collection, finding them at yard sales, antique stores and, quite often, in gift boxes from friends and family.
“For a while, nobody was collecting aprons,” Rider said. “Now it’s kind of hard for me to find something different.”
She displays about 120 of her aprons in her home, and others are stored away.
“I keep thinking I’m not going to buy any more,” she said, weighing the likelihood of putting that thought to action.
Rider has a talent for making the aprons useful, yet decorative.
“I try not to overwhelm people with my aprons,” she said. “... I like to look at them, and I can’t if they’re in a box. They all have memories.”
She’s draped gauzy white aprons across curtain rods to create attractive swags over the kitchen windows.
“Those are old aprons, probably from the 1920s and ’30s,” she said.
An assortment of colorful aprons ring the walls of her bedroom, making a three-dimensional border below the ceiling. In a large utility room, rows of aprons — one below the other, hanging from top to bottom on a wall — have been secured with clothes pins on fabric clotheslines. Among the latter are aprons made long ago by her daughters as 4-H projects.
There are tiny aprons hanging in the kitchen near a wooden high chair holding Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls. Those, she said, are for grandchildren to use when they’re helping her in the kitchen.
Another gift apron is draped above a kitchen storage area. It’s made of a canvas-like fabric and holds drawings, phrases, and signatures of all of the grandchildren. It is no surprise that apron holds a special spot in Rider’s collection and in her heart, as well.
A small display of intricately made pull-thread aprons sits in the living room. They’re made with handwork inserts between the solid fabrics. Rider dated them from the 1920s.
“They were made by girls in New York. They were underprivileged and they wanted them to have something to do,” she explained.
Many of the aprons in Rider’s collection were ones that Baby Boomers often saw on their grandmothers and great-aunts.
“Remember when they had those fancy aprons and the women wore them?” Rider asked as she showed another display. “I wear an apron a lot but I don’t think a lot of people do.”
Some of the aprons looked too fancy to wear, but women in those earlier years wore them anyway.
One was made with woven dishcloths linked together by crochet work and trimmed with three-dimensional crocheted roses.
“There’s a lot of work on it,” Rider said. “Hand-crocheted aprons were popular in the 1930s and ’40s.” Some had Schiffli embroidery and others were made of organdy or organza; some featured delicate cutwork.
A few in Rider’s collection reflect humor.
One shows a man and woman, silhouetted together in a romantic pose with the words: “It starts when you sink in his arms and ends with your arms in the sink.”
A butcher-style apron with the logo of The First Christian Church, Disciples of Christ, cautions: “Thou shalt not serve burnt offerings.”
A Hoover-era apron shows a message still heard today: “Have a good day.”
Around the bedroom, Rider has hung an eclectic assortment half-aprons. One appears to have been made from a plastic shower curtain; that style never caught on, Rider said. Another innovative apron that didn’t prove popular had a flexible plastic ring around the waist, which allowed women of any size to snap on an apron and go.
Others are made from feed sacks, the back side of Wrangler jeans (trimmed with ruffles), dish towels and handkerchiefs. Some are made from gingham and one has a utilitarian hand towel hanging from its waistband, so cooks could wipe their hands as they worked.
A Red Cross apron from World War I shows a little raveling on one side of the red fabric cross. It is draped carefully to protect the aging fabric.
Rider does have a few favorite aprons, all of them made or given to her by family and friends.
A sister-in-law gave her mother’s sugar-sack apron to Rider, and another treasured apron came from a friend, who’d made it in the eighth grade, around 1939 or 1940, Rider said.
“Most of my aprons have some kind of meaning,” she said.