There is something magical and sweet about a child handing you something they have made all by themselves.  It might be the look on their faces when they offer it to you, or the joy in their voices as they crow over their success, or the delight they share openly when you compliment their work.  Children don’t seem to protect themselves the way adults do; they never apologize for flaws or play down their accomplishments; and they give freely and with no motive other than pleasure in the giving.  I love that, and wish that I had more of those qualities for myself.  So a simple sewing project that’s designed to lead to a gift for someone else, well, that’s pretty close to perfection.

Sharp Needles and Sharp Eyes

There is a lot about handwork that requires thought and time: planning the design, executing the stitches, imagining the look of the finished project.  There is also a lot that requires thoughtfulness: planning who will receive the objet once it’s done, planning the exact moment and manner of the gifting, planning what to say when you hand them the thing you’ve made with them in your mind the whole time.  I want my children to learn to be thoughtful in all those ways, about what they make–are my stitches even? do I have room for this design? did I make a knot in my floss before I began?–and about where they put what they make–who will get this?  is it the right gift for that person?  what can I do to make this gift an experience they will treasure?

A simple hand embroidery project can give all those opportunities to our children, and framing their work at the end can take it up a whole other notch.  Asking small children to handle sharp needles can be a little nerve-wracking.  They could get hurt!  They could hurt you!  They could ruin the finish on the table!  Most kids are pretty willing to try new things, and they’ll let you know if it’s too much for them.  Our children were sharp-eyed and excited at the idea of doing Real Sewing with mommy, and it led to a quiet, enjoyable, focused evening for us together.

When I first began embroidering, I thought I’d need to go out and get gobs of floss and needles.  Not only did I find that embroidery floss is absurdly inexpensive–around 35 cents a skein–but that I had inherited boxes of it from Sandra (all numbered by color, naturally).  We brought out a single box to use with the children, but you can easily purchase a multi-pack of two dozen colors for under $5.  I see them frequently at Michael’s in a variety of color combinations.

For needles, I opted to give both my children a blunt-tipped craft needle (the lower one in the image).  This comforted me in terms of their ability to gouge out their own (or each others) eyes, which didn’t happen and probably wouldn’t have, but one can never be too careful.  I was more concerned for my littlest one, who is just over two, since he doesn’t have much experience with needles.  Our four-year-old has done some hand work in her Montessori program, so I was less worried about her. The fifteen-year-old is on her own.  One must prioritize one’s worrying.

Needles were threaded with a double-thickness of floss, tied in a knot at the end, to keep them secure.  Few things frustrate a child while sewing as much as pulling on that needle and watching the tail of the floss go flapping off into the distance, no longer anchored.  Doubling makes the floss substantially thicker, but the blunt needles are also thicker, and the doubled floss fills in that hole better.

All our stitching was done on white Kona cotton, using a 4″ wooden embroidery hoop.  I like a larger hoop myself, but for little hands, smaller is better.  I think having a smaller hoop also limited the sheer area of embroiderability, which is good for learners: giving them a limited palette prevents them from feeling overwhelmed at the outset.

To start with, we worked very free-form, using the needle to push through any old place on the hoop, moving from one part of the fabric to another, just getting the gist of going from front-to-back as we sewed.  Our boy, especially, spent a lot of time focusing on how the needle goes through at the front and where it will come out at the back, like an infant who has just discovered that when you put the ball under the bowl, it’s still there.  He was fascinated by the way the needle drew the floss through the fabric, but he couldn’t really see it on the other side, a whole step up from the plastic canvas, where all the work was really in front of him the whole time.

Our four-year-old wanted to work with something more structured pretty soon, though, and moved on to using a pen to draw shapes to follow on the fabric.  These were pretty free-form, and of course Little Brother wanted to do the same thing.  So sometimes, it was kind of a mess:

I encouraged her to start working on geometric shapes, so that not only is she working out how to handle the needle without getting stuck and how to follow a line she’s drawn, but she can see that her stitches will mirror whatever is beneath them.

She loved the repetition of the stitches, the way she could draw the floss up through the fabric, and having the power and control to really guide the needle.  It was kind of surprising to see–I knew she would be focused and get a little lost in it (as I do), but I didn’t expect her fingers to feel so commanding to her, or for her to express verbally how much of a sense of creation this task gave her.

As she went along, we talked about gifts and giving, and who might like to have a piece of her sewing for their very own.  I want to communicate to my children not only that the things they make are valuable and worthy of giving, but that we can make for someone else as an act of thoughfulness and kindness and love, that using our hands, we can offer them a feeling and create a moment for them that will last long after the giving itself is done.  I don’t want them to grow up thinking that the love is IN the gift, that the reason we give things to others is because we’re obligated to do so; I want them to really internalize the idea that BY giving we communicate something from our hearts, and that we can build relationships through the caring act of making something for another human being.

We began embellishing the embroidery, adding buttons and seeing how those interacted with the floss.  Now, our two-year-old had full-on lost interest at this point and had gone to play trains with his Daddy.  I’m totally down with that.  Again, my purpose is to make this a playground, not a prison, and I have a vested interest in asking my children to craft only when they’re feeling it.  That way, when there is a need to craft–when a gift-giving occasion arises, for example–creating something is an act of joy, which translates itself into the gift.  So by this point, it was just me and Miss M at the table, buttons and floss flying.

We talked about giving a gift to Daddy, and how he would like to see her work.  She knows she’s valued, she knows her work is worth sharing, but I wanted to communicate that to her AND the rest of our family by framing a piece and offering it as a gift:

Because it isn’t just about her putting thought into the making of it all.  And it isn’t really just about her being thoughtful toward others in giving what she’s made.  It’s about us all thinking, about me being thought-full, about me acknowledging that our words and actions today will impact her for a long time to come, and that something small–like framing her embroidery with all its imperfections–can really have meaning for her.

I should point out that I am very much like the dad in A River Runs Through It on this one, though: he made them write and re-write and re-re-write their essays over and over–and when it was done and perfected, he threw it in the trash and sent them out to play.  I am all for empowering our kids to create by framing a piece of work to put on the wall, but at the same time, when that piece has had its say, it comes down to be replaced by another.  Because if we are truly thoughtful, and truly thinking, we recognize that it’s all transient, there is no perfect, each piece is unique and beautiful and worthy of treasuring but that in the end, it will be replaced.  And SHOULD be.  Because it’s the memories we make while we’re making that are worth saving, and those last longer than fabric and thread.  I don’t want to accidentally teach my children to hang on to every scrap of ribbon and every shred of art with the false idea that it matters in and of itself.  I hope that they will see that we applaud it as a reflection of who they were at a moment in time, and who they are becoming, and that nothing in our home matters as much as they do.  Make the best you can make when you make it, but remember that in the end, it’s just stuff, and stuff is never as important as people.

Something to think about.

Sometimes, when children are introduced to new ideas, they struggle with getting their tiny hands around tasks suited to a bigger world.  For them, and for us, it can be tough to stay tuned in when a job feels too big or too tough, and it leads to lack of attention and–gasp!–quitting.  I want my kids to learn to press on through, to recognize that even though the going can get tough, that if we push ourselves, if we challenge ourselves, if we have faith that at the other end of the experience something wonderful is waiting, that we can discover amazing worlds, right in our own hands.

And that last part–the faith in discovery–is a big part of the thought process behind today’s lesson.  I want my kids to trust me, I want them to believe that if Mommy introduces them to a new craft or toy or book or game that it’s because I know they can do it.  I believe in them, I see their ability, and I trust that they can succeed.  HUGE ideas for little people, but central to growing up secure and healthy.  And the seeds for such a giant idea can be sown with something as small as an after-dinner activity.

Plastic Needles and Plastic Canvas

After dinner is hardly the place I would ordinarily do a craft project.  I’m much more likely to plan it for, say, after breakfast, when the light is bright and our bodies are rested and when we’re all full from breakfast and in that golden hour of no-one-screaming.  It lasts from around 9:30 to 11ish at our house each day, that perfect period of contentment when we all universally like one another, and no one is poopy or grumpy or cranky or anxious or tired or hungry or irritated.  It’s my favorite time of day.  But this week, we took a few minutes after supper one night to do our craft, and it was a real risk.  I share this because some of what I learned is the direct result of WHEN we did this lesson, and it wasn’t at all what I expected.

Plastic canvas is a perennial favorite of crafters.  There’s something very Free To Be You And Me about it: it makes us think of tissue box covers and camp.  But for teaching kids to sew, it have some distinct advantages, despite its 1970s afterglow: the holes are precut and regularly spaced, making it easier for tiny fingers to work out the rhythm of stitching; the needles aren’t terribly sharp, and help littler ones avoid any unseemly incidents; the yarn is thick enough that any mistakes or changes in stitch technique are visible right away, making it simple to point out distinctions and build on the lessons of the lacing cards; and the length and complexity of the project is fairly whimsical in nature and can be as persnickety as you’d like (or not), so it suits all ages and inclinations.

I wanted this next lesson to really be about how to hold the needle, where to put the needle, and how moving the needle in new directions changed the way the project turned out.  Again, like the last two lessons, these all seem like super simple concepts, but for children–who are tabluae rasa and don’t have any clear conception of what sewing is, no expectations for this experience–spelling it all out and making it explicit is the best way to lay a foundation that will let you have much more complicated lessons later.

So for the two younger kids, we worked with very few expectations.  Under the warm glow of the overhead lamp in the dining room, after the dishes had been cleared away, we pulled out skeins of yarn in bright solid colors.  Laid out in a row, I produced the plastic canvas and needles.  Plastic canvas is just what it sounds like: plastic sheeting that has been molded into a grid, with the openings appearing at regular intervals to allow a needle and thread or yarn to be passed through it.  The canvas sheets can be cut into shapes, like squares and rectangles, that are then put together (and they also come in little circles!).  I got mine here, in the size 5 and 7.  The smaller number is a larger opening (5 openings per inch in the size 5, for example, so sort of a big hole for the needle to pass through); I wanted to have some that were super easy to use for our two-year-old, and others that were a little more challenging for the oldest and the four-year-old.  I also got some circles, which come in only one grid size (and will use the leftovers to make this fabulous travel sewing kit for myself!).  The plastic needles we keep in stock at Whipstitch, so I brought home four: one for each of the kids, and one for me.

While I’d love to offer you a concrete projecty-project that we did with these supplies, I mostly let this lesson be free-form, and allowed the kids to play with the tools and see what would happen.

The two-year-old tried threading the yarn in and out six or seven times, and then wandered away; I think to a degree, this was pretty challenging work for him, and he lost interest because it was above his interest level.  To lure him back, we spent some time touching the needle to see how sharp it was, looking at the colors of the yarn, and arranging the yarns into a rainbow.  I absolutely didn’t expect this to turn into a chance for him to show off his knowledge of colors, but he really enjoyed that–and his role became that of handing out yarn when his sisters asked for a new color.  Until he bailed again and went and played with his trains.

The four-year-old loved the whole concept from beginning to end.  She wanted to thread the needle, she wanted to poke it through the openings in the canvas, she wanted to change colors every thirty seconds.  But she got frustrated.  When we first began, I used basic Plastic Canvas Rules about how to treat the end of the yarn: ordinarily, when working on a project with plastic canvas, you’d leave the yarn end unknotted and work the loose end back under the stitches later, to secure it.  With an eager child who likes to YANK, that’s not gonna do the trick.  So we ended up doubling the yarn and knotting the end to make it possible for her to see results.

The oldest got much more into this than I expected–I think I’ve said that for every lesson, so maybe I should just start to realize that even at 15, she wants to feel included and she loves to do crafts and working with her hands gives her an excuse to be part of the hearth and the family.  She immediately decided on a formal shape to create, and began working away at it.  About halfway through, she saw that it was going to take her longer than she had imagined, and she slowed down a little.  It took some encouragement to prevent her from changing her design into something more simple just to make the work shorter, and to convince her to go with her original vision.

As the kids worked, I talked to the girls about colors and the color wheel.  As they created their projects, I worked on a couple of stitch samplers, and we looked at primary and secondary colors, our younger girl asked about how colors blend and we imagined where white and black fit in the color spectrum, our oldest asked what would happen if she skipped boxes or stitched straight lines versus diagonals, so we practiced on the color wheel.  It was a good chance to look at some more complicated color ideas while our fingers were busy with the repetitive motion of stitching the canvas.  It made the time pass a little more quickly as the girls reached their finish points, and made it a little easier to convince them to stick with it when there seemed to be miles of empty squares ahead of them.

Our oldest worked on a rainbow, her version of a color wheel.  The four-year-old did some random stitching at first, but then decided that she wanted to make a barn–after seeing what her sister and I were working on, she made the leap and realized that the stitches didn’t have to be random, but could be organized to make a picture.  Her barn is pink, naturally.

Even my husband played a little–I think he saw that we were all sitting around the table, talking and trying something new, and thought he would give it a whirl.  The children were delighted, I kid you not–they loved seeing Daddy with a needle in his hand.

It’s Like A Rubber Tree Plant

Once again, I learned more from the teaching than I think the kids did from the lesson.  I thought I was demonstrating to them that they could work at their challenge level–above the point where the work is super easy and they can mail it in, but not quite to the point where it’s so tough that they’re frustrated, right at that level where it’s hard and they have to push a little to get it, but that is totally achievable for them.  And I was, I was teaching them that.  But at the same time, I was learning the same lesson: persistence.  Trying one time didn’t get the needle and yarn to work for our four-year-old.  She needed to try over and over, and I needed to adjust how I’d assumed the whole project was going to work.  Practicing the action of slipping the needle into the canvas was OK for our youngest, but it was hard enough that he lost interest; rather than let him wander off and assuming that he was too young, I had to persist in finding a way to make him part of our time together, in making this craft something that was relevant to him.  Our oldest wanted to dial back and make the work easier, and I had to find ways to encourage her to continue on without quitting–but not make her feel as though she was obligated to do it, without taking the fun out of it.

As the kids learn more about sewing, the work gets more challenging, and they begin to have to think about three dimensions and right sides and wrong sides and matching seams and operating machinery.  This project might look simple at the outset, but it’s about building confidence, establishing a rhythm of work, and learning that there is totally a pay-off on the other side.  I think if we’d done this lesson when we normally would have, and weren’t racing bathtime and a little tired at the end of the day, I might have missed some chances to see better what my kids have to say about how they learn and what they learn.  We all really enjoyed working with the gridded lines, letting our brains have a break even before our bodies did, and settling in to the soft repetition of stitching in and out.  It makes me hopeful as we move forward that they’ll begin to associate sewing with happy times, loving times, trusting times.  And that after all, they’ll be persistent when they set a goal for themselves, because there is always something warm and happy waiting for them on the other side.

Our oldest was gone for a whole week, visiting with my mother for her annual summer retreat from the siblings.  It was much, much harder to have her away than I thought it would be.  We celebrated her birthday at the lake with my folks, and while we were there, it occurred to me that she wouldn’t ALWAYS want to spend her birthday with us.  In a few years, she’ll want to spend it with her friends, and a few years after that, with her husband, and a few years after that, with her own kids.  It was a bit of a blow, I’ll be honest.  She’s fifteen now, and suddenly she’s not a little girl anymore.

Measuring her for her new clothes, I see in the tape just how grown up she’s become.  It reminded me of my favorite George Bernard Shaw quote, from Man and Superman:

The only person who behaves sensibly is my tailor.  He takes my measure anew every time he sees me.  All the rest go on with their old measurements.

In a lot of ways, I think that summarizes my entire parenting philosophy: I want to meet my kids all over again each day, and know them for who they are, rather than for who I want or expect them to be.  Sewing for our oldest has given me the chance to see her through her eyes, and have a better picture of what she thinks of herself.  It’s invaluable information for any parent, and helps me know how to respond to her and how to better understand the subtext when she acts all crazy cakes the way a fifteen-year-old is bound to do.  Making clothing for her for what may be one of the last times as she grows up and grows out of our house, I am grateful for the chance to see her unfold into a whole person, and hopeful for the future she sees in front of her.

It all happens each day, one stitch at a time, as we sew our children’s lives and they accept and run.  Roots and wings, y’all.

My husband is probably one of the most wonderful, supportive husbands who ever graced this planet.  He loves me, admires my work, is my biggest cheerleader and my best PR agent.  He also, on occasion, says things without thinking.  This does not lessen his love for me (nor mine for him), but it does put me in the position of feeling a bit defensive now and then.  Especially on the days where I didn’t accomplish as many things on my to-do list as I’d like, and am feeling particularly vulnerable.  I think sewing, like parenting, is a gig where you’re always DOING but not really often DONE with what you’re working on–life and craft are both a work in progress.

Months ago, I read an article about how we all ought to look at our days not as a TO-do list, but rather as a DID-do list.  Today was one of those days.  So on the off chance that my husband comes home and sees that this list isn’t even close to being accomplished:

• get bookkeeping up-to-date
• fold all laundry and put away
• tidy family room and put away all toys
• call my sister and see how her knee is feeling
• take out all garbage and recycling to the curb
• organize garage and carry out all empty boxes
• make bed
• pick up veggies from CSA
• send thank-you notes for baby gifts

at least I’ll have THIS list to compensate for it:

• prepared three meals for five people (including packing husband’s lunch)
• nursed four times
• changed 8 poopy diapers between two children, one of whom is suffering from intestinal distress
• began hand quilting the quilt I’ve had sitting around for M these past eightish months
• thought about layout ideas for the next pattern I’m working on (thinking totally counts)
• emailed out all the Overmost orders for today
• cleaned up three spilled drinks (all water, thank heaven)
• played three rounds of “Where did baby go?”
• colored chalk for 20 whole mintues
• snatched one mischievous toddler from the jaws of death (OK, from getting into the dishwasher, but still)
• loaded and unloaded the dishwasher (not with children–with dishes)
• conquered Day 2 of Operation Regular Sleep Schedule for the nearly-eight-week-old (woot!)
• wondered five times what I’d make for supper
• replied to dozens of emails for the shop, and corrected one mistake I made yesterday
• fed the dog
• taught O where his arm is–hey! new words! (after reviewing eye, ear, nose, hair and mouth)
• forced baby to have Tummy Time (which we both hated)
• brushed my hair (some days, this is not a high enough priority, so today, it makes the list)
• designed two new graphics for this very blog post (see?)

I’m feeling pretty good about myself, from looking at that “did” list.  The “do” list is making me think my house is embarrassingly filthy, but then I remind myself that I am raising human beings and creating art, and that those things have an intrinsic value that goes far, far beyond what can be gotten from a scrubbed toilet or a vacuumed welcome mat.  So, Sweet Husband, this is why the bed didn’t get made–I was super busy with ALL THIS STUFF.  Thank you for being so wonderful and understanding, and putting up with the piles of laundry, and for always recognizing that sometimes, the biggest contributions are the most invisible.

Good heavens, I’m exhausted!  Maybe we’ll get take out tonight.  Whaddya think?