The girls have been watching me while I work on embroidering doll faces and they asked if they could do some hand stitching as well. It’s been a while since I first taught them how to embroider. Like so many things children learn, they’re interested for a while, then set it aside for a time.
There’s something magical that happens during that time, I think. For when we (finally) found two embroidery hoops (that had been used as bracelets and rolling toys and were not in my sewing basket like I thought they would be), and brought out a basket of colorful threads, they needed nearly no instruction at all.
I gave them a book of stitching patterns to look through and traced their chosen patterns onto their fabric. They needed a bit of a refresher – needle up here, needle down there. And this time I taught them how to start and end their threads so that they’d be securely hidden on the back of their work. An entire morning of stitching happened!
They aren’t finished yet, and really, they may never complete these projects. But their work waits for them in the thread basket to gather up whenever they’d like.