kids sewing party – craft schmaft owls

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by Janice on 09/30/2012

Our eldest, Ava, is about to turn 8 and REALLY wanted a sewing party for her birthday. Sigh. I tried to redirect to crochet or knitting, but she really, really wanted a sewing party.

This is problematic for a few reasons. I am not very good at teaching groups as I tend to demonstrate how to do things much better than I can verbalize what needs to happen. I also have tried to teach my girls before (they are currently 6 and 8) and it always seemed to dissolve into tears. Added to this, there appears to be a high degree of variability of skill and / or interest at this age, and I wasn’t sure if the invitees would remain engaged.

Lately though, my girls have been sewing felt pillows and animals with our caregiver, Daiga. The girls use cookie cutters to trace the designs and then cut out, sew and stuff them. While this would have made a nice project, I wanted the invitees to achieve something special during the party – taking home something they felt proud of, but also something that inspired them to keep sewing.

The patterns at Craft Schmaft caught my eye a little while ago, but given my backlog of projects, I hadn’t been able to justify purchasing a pattern. I felt that with a few modifications to the pattern, the girls would be able to tackle them, and yippee, I also got to try out the pattern. We did felt beaks instead of embroidery and I did a few work ahead steps, such as cutting and machine sewing all of the owl ‘blanks’, cutting out all of the felt and fabric pieces, and sewing in a gathering thread at the base of the owl to facilitate closing them up after stuffing. This left only two stitches for the girls to learn, the running stitch and the slip stitch.

Our prototypes are the first owls shown above. We also did a test run, the week before the party, to gauge whether it could be done in 2 hours, and whether it was too hard. Special thanks to my friend Sheila, and her 8 year old and 5 year old girls, for being our guinea pigs alongside my daughters. The test subjects are shown below.

test owls

The test run led us to pre-thread 4 needles for each of the girls attending, as this was clearly the bottleneck in the process!  The party was a big hit and several of the Mom’s have since written to say their girls spent the rest of the afternoon sewing everything they could get their hands on! The take home loot bags were small sewing kits with extra socks, buttons, felt and scrap fabric, along with a hand-out of stitch how to’s, printed from the sew 4 home site.

My girls’ final owl products were done in a hurry during the party, as they were so excited that their friends were making owls too – I found they were going more for speed than accuracy!

owls from the party

owls in our family

After the guests left, the girls and I took our time on our next project, and over the rest of the rainy afternoon, ended up making the ‘Woof Woof’ pattern as well. They were more careful (and had some help with the mouths), and are even more smitten with their puppies! They sewed all afternoon today and I am thrilled that they are so interested in one of my favourite past-times.

our sock puppies

 

the entire sock gang

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