Its never too young to start sewing...

My eight year old grand daughter has taken to the sewing machine like a duck to water... I've been meaning to do more sewing with her but there are never enough hours when they visit but this time..with the little one completely engrossed with the play kitchen - endless cups of pretend tea and plates of weird combinations of plastic food - we were able to sit at the sewing machine and have some time for a proper lesson.

My new machine has a speed control and with it at its slowest we practiced really boring stuff like straight lines and joining fabric together. My personal philosophy on learning new skills is make something you want right at the beginning and incorporate the learning into that project. That way you get a sense of achievement and a skill at the same time. This is particularly important if you are 8 years old with the attention span of a gnat!!!

So we did straight lines to hem a bit of calico and then did a few more staight lines using fancy stitches and then with a couple of folds turned it into useful little bag for the naughty little sisters kitchen shopping...

Then a real challenge - after a rummage though nana's fat quarter stash four different flowery fabrics started to become a pair of shorts! Nana cut them out and with some guidance and a tiny bit of help on the tricky curvey bits a very clever girl sewed them up on the sewing machine. Even learning how to thread it up and change a spool!

Its fabulous to watch enthusiasm just blossom! Next up was a big bag for mummy with double shoulder straps painstaking decorated with vivid purple fancy stitching.. this is girl after my own heart.

After that I felt confident to leave my junior apprentice to her own devices with minimum supervision. She spent the whole afternoon experimenting with the different stitches practicing sewing shapes onto calico... making some mistakes but definetely showing an appitude for this particular form of creativity.. just like her mum and nana... so rewarding!

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