Tuesday, November 11, 2014: Having a day in: Crafts for Babygirl

The weather is cold and wet today, and as Babygirl and I had nothing pressing to do outside of the house we decided to stay in today.  (Besides, that gives me an opportunity to do a few extra loads of laundry.  hooray...)  Babygirl is a champion at self entertainment, but I like to have something "new" for her to do every once in a while.

About a month ago I read Childhood 101's blog about a sewing basket she had made for her daughter.  (I originally found the article from a link on pintrest, of course!)  She also has another post that involves some additions to the sewing basket which sound great as well!  Anyway, I thought it was a great idea and that Babygirl would love to have a little sewing kit!  On the next trip to Michael's i picked up some plastic canvas shapes, and some yarn samples (I thought normal size skeins would be a little overwhelming and just end up getting tangled).  We already owned plastic tapestry needles I use for knitting (more on those later), needle threaders, extra safety scissors, and an extra bin.

Babygirl entertained herself for most of the morning with her toys, cutting shapes (she loves cutting!), stickering the cut shapes, "reading", matching socks (she loves matching socks out of the laundry!), and other "projects" she invented for herself.  After lunch I brought out this "sewing kit" and we went over how to thread the needle, how to tie a knot, and how to "sew" on the plastic canvas.  I immediately wished I had bought plastic canvas needles (and I will look for some next time I am in a craft store) because the tapestry needle I stole from my knitting supplies does not pass through the plastic canvas very easily!  Babygirl can manage with the tapestry needles, but it does make pulling the needle through difficult, and it means we could not use the circle shapes because pulling the tapestry needle through is *very* difficult!  Lesson learned!

Babygirl had lots of fun with this, and it kept her busy from lunch time until naptime!  Win!

She can't wait to add the next color (she has already decided on turquoise) to her project!  And she has learned how to thread a needle all by herself!  (Other than the needle threading this is a pretty "high supervision" project.  I did have to keep reminding her to remember not to wrap her thread around the edges and not to tangle it, and tying knots is the Achilles's heel for the day!)

At the end her project session.  Beautiful!