I had my granddaughter using my Janome 4800- by herself- at age 5. She
shopped for fabric from my stash for a large potholder- and chose colors
that coordinated well and matched her mom's kitchen. We fussy cut the
center square, added a border to each side, did a pillow turn with the
sandwich, and diagonal line quilting (she marked it with the wheeled chalk
marker). She did it all except I used the rotary cutter to cut the borders.
And granny (me!) did some serious hovering while she used the scissors, pins
and sewing machine. ;-) It turned out great!

Go for it! Woohoo!

Leslie & The Furbabies in MO.


"Hanne" wrote in message
...

I'm thinking about giving a friends daughter some 1-1 sewing classes
as part of her birthday present. She is going to be 8.

I found this site:
http://www.kids-sewing-projects.com/
which looks pretty good.

I'd prefer to go straight for the sewing machine, but skipping things
like how to thread it - I mean, I'll be sitting right next to her, and
I also think that getting to fun stuff sooner is more important. And
her dad's machine obviously threads differently anyway. Of course,
we'd be doing the "follow the line on paper" part before sewing on
fabric.

I did show her how to do some needle tatting last Summer and she tried
it out - not enough to show anything off, but enough that she, that
day, got the idea. She has pretty good attention span and good fine
motoric skills. And we get on :-)

Am I nuts? Do we need to do handstitching first?

Thanks for any input you might have.

Hanne in DK