Writers and artists love aprons.
We wear a lot of them.
We wear out a lot of them.
When I put on an apron it means I’m ready to write, paint, draw and imagine.
My other favorite thing to wear is hiking boots. I wear out a lot of those, too.
To find out about more than aprons, click here for answers to the questions people ask me all the time!
To find out more about hiking in amazing places, click here.
All material on this site, both text and graphics, is © Betsy James, and may not be used commercially without her permission.
WORLD-BUILDING and WILDERNESS: 
Hilarious Betsy. You’ve inspired me to look for an appropriate apron. I used to wear lab coats when painting but have run out of them in my HImalayan studio. An apron is something that I should be able to find.
It looks like you are having such fun with yours!
Lab coats! I never thought of that, and I should have. (My mother was a zoologist.) But aprons are great. Just be sure, whether they’re custom or off the rack, that the material is thick enough. Otherwise you’ll find you’ve painted a masterpiece on your favorite shirt.
Yes, I remember that one of your parents was a zoologist. Isnpt there an entomologist in there somewhere too?
OK I will check for thickness…and fleas at the same time. Nothing like bringing home some new clothes from the local fair and finding out that you’ve brought a colony of fleas along with them.
Mother zoologist (Berkeley ca. 1939–only woman in the department!), father geologist. A nice legacy. And fleas are better than bedbugs!
You’ve got that right…I’ll take fleas everyone, given that choice.
My father was also a scientist, animal nutritionist with Agriculture Canada, poultry division. I was trained as a biologist and ended up working at the same location as my Dad for a while, the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa, drawing aphids, flies and later microlepidoptera. It was a great gig, using binocular scopes and compound microscopes with drawing tubes attached.
Interesting: my first paid gig, at sixteen, was drawing mayflies. Nothing so fancy as drawing tubes. Just scratched glasses and a crick in the neck. It was fun. It took me ages to shake tight, precise ink line, though.