When Grandma Libby visited over Thanksgiving, she brought something special for Cady Gray: Her portable sewing machine. Since she was upgrading, and since I've embarked on sewing this year with the usual interest from my daughter, Cady Gray got the benefit of a sturdy, small Janome 3128 of her very own.
As every weekend since then has approached, CG has asked me if we could sew with her new machine. There was only one big obstacle in the way -- my vision of a work area in the corner of her room, with a multipurpose table where the sewing machine could live and all kinds of work could be spread out when needed.
We went antiquing and flea-marketing a couple of weekends ago to see if we could make the vision happen. And there at our last stop was this used table sitting in a warehouse. Fifty bucks, said the man. We'll take it, we said.
That very day we started sewing. First some practice sewing straight, guided by stripes on fabric. The next day, armed with more scraps and the tail-end of a bag of lentils, and made a quick bean bag.
Before the next weekend arrived, she prompted me to start looking for a project we could do. I saw this felt garland project on a blog I follow, and I knew it was perfect. Straight to the sewing after cutting -- no ironing and measuring and clipping. And once I got CG started, she could sew as many miles as she wanted without supervision.
I pulled out this beautiful hand-finished circle-marking tool from the folks at WindFire Designs and started drawing circles for her to cut. As the circles piled up, she got more and more confident using the scissors we had gotten to be hers alone.
One right after the other. Maximum machine time, minimum fuss.
The garland piled up on the other side of the machine.
By the time she worked through the entire stack, the string was nine feet long.
And irresistible.
We hung it up near her ceiling, spanning a corner right above her new work table where the sewing machine waits for its next project. Thanks, Grandma Libby!
1 comment:
Thank you so much for showing us how you use our tool. I found this page by chance as I was checking for images of the circle tool. As it so happens, we have just released a larger one (which is why I noticed this post)
http://www.windfiredesigns.com/Tools/CircleTool/index.html
Thanks again for posting about this really cool project that teaches sewing. You can tell her that I learned to sew at about her age!
Sincerely,
Tim Elverston, WindFire Designs
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