Sewing with a Granddaughter

Contents of the bag of "lettuce"

Goal number five on my August list was to sew strings with my four year old granddaughter. I brought out the string bag which she immediately found interesting. Her words were, "Gran, why is that bag of lettuce in here?" 

I had to laugh because I could see the image of prepared salad represented in that bag. Before I could snap a photo of her holding the bag, she had dumped the contents on the table to inspect the scraps. She is one busy four year old. Some part of her body is in motion at all times. She liked sorting the "lettuce" (AKA green scraps) into piles of like fabrics. 

Ready to reverse stitch

She found threading the machine and changing the foot on the machine interesting. She thought it a hoot that the foot of the machine was called a foot. At first, she thought I was joking. She pointed to her foot and said, "Silly, Gran, this is a foot!"

She liked choosing the fabric to sew to the strip; but, she quickly lost interest in sewing the strips to the paper. Even a short seam took too long to stitch! No way did she participate in pressing as she said the iron was too dangerous for a kid like her! She did find the stitch lever fun to use. There are a few strings with reverse sewing in the middle of the string because she liked seeing how the lever worked while I stitched! She lost interest after stitching about six strings.

Ripping the paper from the string rectangles

I left the strings out and got out the papers to stitch an additional green block for my Rainbow Scraps Challenge. She liked using Elmer's glue stick to adhere the constant strip to the paper. Again, she chose the fabric and we stitched enough rectangles to make the center of one block. Another day, we added the gray and black strings to the block.

Ripping the paper fro the string strips

She watched while I trimmed the blocks. I told her it was time for the paper removal step. She LOVED ripping the paper from the back of the blocks. She used a special wand to loosen the paper from the stitching. The wand is a cuticle stitch with a bead attached that I use as a stiletto. She could rip the paper as quickly and as cleanly as I did! She did let me know it took way too long to get to this step!

During periods while she"rested her eyes." I stitched more strings for the RSC and my book club quilt. Over about four days we actually sewed quite a few strings. At the end, I had a small bag of green strings remaining! 

Leftover strings

In another post, I'll share the progress I have made on my book club quilt as well as the progress on the Rainbow String Scrap Challenge. Linking to: Oh Scrap and Sew & Tell.