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The Gift of Making

    The other day, Emma and Sophie asked me for help to make gifts for some little friends.

    Honestly, the timing wasn’t great because I had so much of my own to do.  They were asking for some creative help and given my distracted thoughts I had a tough time wrapping my brain around their ideas well enough to translate them into creative tasks they had the abilities to handle.

    It turns out though, they really didn’t need my help at all with the creative side of things.  They only needed me to lend a hand with some of the technical pieces – how big to cut, where to sew, threading the machine and a reminder of how to do a ladder stitch.  Other than that, they used their own ideas, changing a little when they found something that wasn’t working and finding new ways around obstacles.

    Silas spent much of the time working on his knitting, chatting away and saying the knitting rhyme as he worked:  

    “In through the front door, around the back, out through the window, and off jumps Jack!” 
    “Did you know Jack is very poor?  That’s why he sold the cow.  I’m making him a sweater.”
    “Look! I can make the window really big!  That’s why it’s so cold.” 
    “If you pour your coffee down the sink, it will get warmer outside.”  (I had to have him explain this one to me.  His theory is that if I pour hot coffee down the drain, it goes outside to the ground and the ground will heat up, thus warming the air as well.)

    I can’t share what the girls made here, because the recipients might see the gifts before they’re given.  In the end, I’m pretty glad I didn’t have the time to really focus on helping them through the whole thing, because they learned so much by doing it all themselves.  You could see the sense of accomplishment when Papa came home and they all rushed to the door to show him what they made.  So the girls made gifts to give, Silas is apparently making a sweater for a poor boy named Jack, and we all received much through the making.

     

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