A few years from now, I'll be teaching Evelyn how to sew. We'll embark on stitching tiny dolls clothes or making a skirt out of fabric that she choose herself. I'll teach her about buttons and zippers and seam allowences and seam rippers. probably a lot about seam rippers. Like me, she'll choose a pattern with too many tiny pearl buttons and cry with frustration when I wont just do it for her. She'll skip steps and I'll make her go back and rip out seams and iron them before proceeding. I might even make her prewash her fabric, even though I hate doing it myself. I have all that to look forward to.
But I also think it's important for boys to know how to sew. When Will and I were dating, I taught him to sew a Hawaiian Shirt. Other than the sleeves that I had to put in because he was beyond frustrated and the fact that he cut half of the fabric out upside down when I was setting up the machine resulting in the left half of the shirt's palm trees pointing down while the right side pointed up, it turned out OK. And I can rest easy knowing that he knows how to fix a seam, sew on a button and even darn a sock in a pinch. Not that he does anymore, he's more likely to hand it off to me. But at least I know he can. So along those lines, I decided to teach Briton to sew this week. Well, let's say I started to teach him to sew.
Knowing that Cabbage Patch Kids clothes or lacy dresses weren't going to be up his alley, I let boys be boys and we set out to make an, um, interesting, stuffed animal. I let him flip through the book that came in a Plush-O-Rama kit, watched him weigh the benifits of his favorite specimins (he decided to make it for a friend who's birthday was coming up, a girl, so it had to be a little girlie) helped him trace out a pattern and away we went.
The kit is cute (and with the subtitle Curious Creatures for Immature Adults, just had to be tried!) and really does come with almost everything you need to make a creature (Scissors were the only thing we needed that wasn't included) Briton settled on a rabbit like thing made from the yellow fleece that came with the kit. We cut out ears and legs and body and learned how to embroider (well, in a vague sense) and the good old fashioned, all purpose running stitch and after one afternoon of cutting and embroidering and another of sewing and stuffing, had a pretty darn adorable stuffed rabbit. Funky, yes, but still totally cute. And as a bonus, Briton has requested that we raid my scrap bag and make another for him AND one for his sister. Success!
Now I wonder if I could get him to knit....