my daughter is 9 and loves to sew..first i got her one of those toy macines and she was very unhappy baecuse the seams fall out as there is no bobbin..now she uses a old kenmore and has a blast !! she prefers to create her "own" patterns and designs to using preprinted ones..i think i see a Vera Wang in the making hehe.. i make alot of our clothes and i think my family likes it at least they wear what i make so thats a good sign.
You discovered the secret of modern so-called toy sewing machines! Congrats to you and your daughter!
I teach kids her age to sew on real sewing machines (I have a whole flock of them!). It's so much fun to see what they will create next! :D
The toy one I had in the mid 70's was no better. I just sewed by hand till I inherited my grandmother's Singer.
-Liz
"Toy" machines tend to just annoy and frustrate interested children who are trying to learn to sew..They usually only sew a chain stitch, and they generally do that poorly..
I started on an (old) white portable ss machine when I was 6 years old. I learned how to fill and load the bobbin and thread the machine.. I see nothing wrong with this approach at all. (I also started to learn to cook at 6 using my mother's kitchen). Today's safety mavens have absolute hissy-fits about these concepts, but I never stitched through my fingers, nor seriously harmed myself in the kitchen. (I don't count a very minor scorch of the fingertips when learning how to remove a baking sheet from the oven.)
If we follow through competely with all the dire warnings about what we are supposed to "protect" children from nowdays, the children in question will never learn anything useful.
Just my 02 cents. me
snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news:1180578576.091832.7660 @n15g2000prd.googlegroups.com:
I see really nice sewing machines at yard sales all the time, ranging in price from $25 to $40. I almost picked up one with a cabinet last weekend, but where the heck am I going to put it? It was pretty much the same one my mom used to use and they wanted $40 for it. Sigh.
I highly recommend going with a "real" machine when anyone asks.
I totally agree with "me". I remember my first experience when I was 5-6, with baking. I burned my hand taking a pan of biscuits from the oven of my DGM's wood stove. But the next morning, I was in the kitchen to help bake biscuits again. The hand healed w/no damage. My DGS, who graduated from high school last week, was helping with the candied yams on Christmas after he turned 4 in mid-October. He burned his fingers, removing them from the oven and looked at his Mom with big tears in his eyes and announced, "I'll be a cold cooker, I not like hot cooking." Thank goodness, he long ago changed his mind. My children followed my example of teaching their children to cook, sew, whatever, when they were young. If you refuse to allow them to experiment, they will never learn. Emily
Use it as an extra table in your dining or living room? IMHO, there is always a need for an extra table somewhere in the house. Emily
Night stands, entry tables, end tables, buffet surfaces, even plant stands but please please please use leakproof trays to prevent "doilies" on the surface. I have even heard that four machine cabinets pushed together makes a dining room table.
Sewing machine collectors - those who tend toward treadles, especially nice ones like parlor cabinets - are very creative about housing their machines. Some even have one in the bathroom.
The design of the cabinets was clearly to make them dual-purpose -- there's a Singer cabinet that doubles as a desk, complete with ink well in the top drawer. Library tables, occasional tables, consoles, and it's always nice when the cabinet is a particularly fine piece of furniture.
*looking at my gorgeous birds-eye maple cabinet and my oak drawing room cabinet*How neat that this topic surfaced this week. My 5 3/4-year-old granddaughter is staying with us this week. She loves to do crafty things so I bought a pattern to make her a halter top and shorts set and we'll be making it "together." I'm going to be taking pictures along the way for her scrap book and hopefully we'll end up with something we can both be proud of!
Liz H.
WooHoo!! ANd my 7yo son wants to start learning how to se, starting with some shorts for himself. SO tonight, I bought some inexpensive cotton in a wild blue print, and later this week, he and I will be working on them. He wanted me to cut them out for him, but I told him that if he wants to learn, he needs to learn ALL the steps...he didn't complain too much :-)
Larisa
Liz wrote:
Larisa, hopefully your DS will be more interested than was my DGD. She helped me cut out the pieces we needed, but it was downhill all the way from there. I always use our pool table to lay out the pattern pieces and do the pinning. I sat her on the pool table with my tomato pin cushion and gave her the job of passing me pins as needed. I even got her to pass them to me head first so I didn't stick myself. Within just a few minutes she had somehow managed to split the strawberry thingy and dump the sand onto the material. I assured her that it was not a big deal as I had a backup pin cushion, but by the time I had fetched it she was already off the table and into another room, painting a picture. However, when she saw me take the cover off my sewing machine she pulled up her chair and got interested once more. I let her "steer" a few pieces of scrap material through the needle while I worked the pedal, and she did very well in that she was able to sew in an almost perfectly straight line. But then shestarted getting goofy, squirming around on my lap and knocking over a box of notions. After very few minutes I could tell that my patience was not going to last much longer so I called it a day. We'll see how tomorrow goes.
Yay! Good for you - both! :D
Take it from a teacher: baby steps at that age! Their concentration span is about 15 miniutes, after which a change of activity is in order. This is why most primary school lessons of an hour in one subject (like maths) contain several different short activities. As they get older, the attention span stretches out.
Give her something to do to help you for a few minutes, then give her something else: she could pin the pockets and then go find the thread, then come back and help pin the skirt, then find a trim or zip, and so on. I build a lot of different stages and things to do into the lessons when I'm teaching sewing (or anything else), especially with the younger ones.
When it comes to the sewing, let her sew up a small bag out of the scraps and help you with long seams: break it down into different activities all the way along. It takes longer to make the garment that way, but you get there in the end! I remember my mum doing this with me when I made that first skirt, aged seven. Mind you, we didn't have a pattern, so I missed that stage out on the first garment we did! :D It was a dirndle style skirt, in loose weave cotton, so we just drew threads to make it even and cut along the gaps!
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