Sewing lessons for kids

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:

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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

Reply to
Hanne
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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.

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:

formatting link
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

Reply to
Leslie & The Furbabies in MO.

What a great site! Now bookmarked for future use. You are not nuts! Any child with the desire is surely able to operate a machine at this age. (I was using mom's machine unsupervised at age

6.) It has the big advantage of producing results quickly. I once helped my daughter's entire 2nd-grade class make drawstring bags for their sports clothes, had a friend to help so we had 2 machines. About 15 kids IIRC. They were all able to stitch their bags >I'm thinking about giving a friends daughter some 1-1 sewing classes
Reply to
Roberta

I think teaching kids sewing at a young age is wonderful. My mother taught me and by the age 11 I was helping her sew baby overalls from home. We got through a huge amount each week and it really made a difference to their budget.

My own daughters were sewing dolls clothes by hand at age six, even cutting them out with supervision. Still got some of the ones they made for the cats too.

Unfortunately nothing like that was ever offered at school - even though suggestions were made by some parents to help with the class.

Their high school only offered one term per year for home economics and that also included cooking, so not much was taught unless you decided to make a career of it.

Reply to
DiMa

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