Evolution

Emily made this ball. I am so proud.

My kids make a lot of things. The vast majority don't end up being shared on this blog because I can barely keep up with photodocumenting the process and outcomes, let alone writing prose about them.  But, funnily enough, these girls enjoy seeing the work of their hands on Mom's blog. They think it's a big deal. And I am proud to share them. But there is a part of me that still (naively) believes there you can have a craft life outside the internet, outside blogs, outside instagram and Facebook - you know, like in the old days when you crafted simply because you enjoyed the making, and didn't give two hoots about the validation? 

Sometimes I deliberately keep crafts off the blog just to feel that again, just so I can say, "These crafts are ours, and we made them together one rainy afternoon and they are too precious a family memory to let the internet turn them into some stranger's goal on Pinterest."

It's a funny thing, the internet. It brings people together like nothing else, and delivers information that would otherwise take years to find, let alone consolidate into an hour's worth of reading. But it has no boundaries. And it's like one of those two-way mirrors in the line-up rooms at police stations: you never know who's reading what you wrote, and what they're thinking about it. 

Scully put it best when she said, "The internet's not good for you, Mulder!"

Ain't that the truth? Gotta love the X-Files. 

But this project of Emily's - she's made five already - I want to share it today because I looked at these little patchwork balls and I saw evolution.

It's no secret that my hope for my children is that they will want to learn to sew, and that they will learn to sew without patterns. By that, I don't mean that they should end up exactly like me, and not even know how to use a commercial pattern. I do mean that I hope they will not be dependent on commercial patterns, without which they'd feel unable to make stuff. Sewing, after all, is a means to an end - the end being the ability to not just make, not just adapt, but create. 

While thinking about how to teach my kids to sew, I wondered about the sequence and approach: skills first? Visualization first? Hands-on first? Machine first? Hand-sewing first? Project-based? Patternmaking-based? Drafting vs. draping? Teacher-oriented? Learner-driven?

(Most of you guys probably don't get quite that didactic, and good on you, but I've spent too many years in education, and they are shackles I now cannot throw off. It's very sad.)

I can't count the number of times I've found myself thinking, "Er, we have a free afternoon. Nobody's doing anything. I should probably initiate a sewing lesson. Maybe one of the girls would like to hand-stitch a flower (or something dead easy)." Then the moment passes because someone suddenly shouts, "Let's play Village!" or "I'm going over to the Johnsons' now, Mom!" And off they run, and I wonder if I'd just let another opportunity slip by.

No. 

I've found that children live by a different timeline than adults. When the time is wrong, nothing we do can make them learn. But when the time is right, it's like they never needed a teacher - they pull it out from inside themselves, all the things they've observed and listened to when you thought they weren't aware you were even on the planet, let alone trying to tell them things.

I'm writing this overly-flowery post today to share this with you, friends: be prepared to be surprised by your children, and by the power of their creativity. Let them go, and don't teach them too much. When they're ready, they'll floor you.

So, these balls. 

My Emily - she's eleven - is a dabbler. She tries everything (except squid, although we plan to rectify that in Singapore soon). And if she finds a friend who dabbles in similar things, they are soul mates. Recently, she made a new friend in class who sews, which thrilled her to no end. This friend, she said, has made a patchwork ball from odd-shaped scraps; can she do the same with our scraps? 

Well, duh! True, I wasn't entirely convinced that odd-shaped scraps could successfully become a sphere, but perfect geometry was not the point in this particular exercise.

Some hours later, we had Prototype 1, an adorable little peapod of a ball. I have no photos of that for you because, as we said earlier, some things are precious and we want to keep them that way. Emily used the whipstitch - apart from the running stitch, it was the only hand-stitch she knew at the time. There were very few seams to sew, because she used very few pieces of scraps, not fully visualizing at the time that more scraps = larger internal volume = more likely to approximate a fully symmetrical sphere.

Most pertinent was this takeaway from Prototype 1: Emily figured out that by turning the finished ball (pre-stuffing) inside out, so that the whipstitched seams were now on the inside, the seams looked neater. She then decided that the inside of the ball was now going to be the more polished-looking outside of the ball. Suddenly, and without me drilling stuff into her head, she'd discovered the significance of RS and WS, and how to place pieces together in a seam to assign one surface as one or the other.

Then in my random web browsing, I discovered Abby Glassenberg's lovely pentagon patchwork ball tutorial. I loved that it perpetuated from a polygon - a ready-made bona fide geometrical DIY pattern, with all-straight sides, something Emily could totally generate herself. 

But.

Children at this age don't like to be told what to do, see. Creatively, I mean. They are on a roll and the universe is one huge endless inventive possibility to them. They do not need mothers to tell them how else to do things that they're already enjoying perfectly well, thank you very much.

This mother, however, loves spheres more than any other shape in the world (because they are superior, period), and makes it her personal mission to educate other people on their supreme perfection.

So we made her a kit. Jenna did, actually. 

And it sat in the pile of What Fun Christmas Gifts I Got This Year.

Until Kate made her astounding blanket-stitch mini-donuts.

"Mom," said Emily, "can you teach me the blanket stitch too?"

I did, and we used the pentagon pieces from that kit. 

And Emily sewed them all together with blanket-stitch, painstakingly joining the seams from corner to corner, until she had a ball. She turned everything RS (or WS, depending on what your reference surface was) out, leaving the blanket-stitched raised seams on the inside, and stuffed her finished project.  

Behold Protoype 2:

I wish I could've captured the look on her face when she realized she had a ball, and that it looked this good, and that she'd produced it by assiduously stitching and not giving up. 

Then, suddenly perplexed, she said, "But when I sew up the opening after stuffing, we'll see the blanket stitches again! Is there another kind of stitch that we can use that's neater?"

Enter ladder stitch.

Two stitches in one project. None of which I initiated the teaching - or even the suggestion - of, as if I were the Guru of Most Appropriate Stitches For Any Given Situation.

But wait, it gets even better.

"I love this so much!" Emily declared. "I want to keep making more! And give them to my friends! And my kindergarten teacher is having a baby and I can give her one!"

Ah yes, mass producing mania. Our family is genetically predisposed to that condition.

"But!" Emily continued, "it will take too long. I want to use the machine."

The machine?

But there are corners in those balls!

120 degree obtuse angled corners that somehow need to meet at neat tri-colored junctions!

We haven't covered that in our SuperAmbitious Homeschool Sewing Curriculum!

Nor threading a sewing machine or winding a bobbin or troubleshooting tension or sewing with knit fabrics and stretch direction or anything like that yet, either!

Good thing I was too busy preparing supper to voice those thoughts and be a wet blanket that night, because the girl dragged the IKEA sewing machine upstairs, figured out how to thread it, and sewed a ball. 

Prototype 3, friends: those two in the front -

I let her run with it - her colors, her fabrics (she attempted fake fur knit and survived), unpicking bad seams, incorrect threading, bobbin case insufficiently pushed into its socket, what happens when we run out of thread in the bobbin, seam easing, loose lightbulb, accidentally-disconnected machine cord ("the machine's not working anymore, Mom!!!!"), unsuitable stitch length, the whole hog. If she needed help, she called for it; if not, I let her be. She knew how to put together the different pieces of this patchwork ball with a sewing machine because hand-stitching the first version helped her visualize how the RS and WS and corners worked. She knew how to troubleshoot the sewing process because she ran into all kinds of funky and we fought those fires when they happened.

I didn't teach.

I didn't have a curriculum.

She asked; I answered.

Simple as that.

Hilarious moment, just minutes into sewing her first few seams: Emily announces, "I think the machine's broken, Mom. It's making a really strange sound."

We both listen, and then I fight back a laugh.

"It's not broken. That, Emily, is the sound of a $60 machine when you've been used to a $600 one."

We both guffaw.

I think I know what to get her for her 12th birthday. Not because it would be a Useful Thing For Every Child To Have, but because she's outgrown the one she's already using.

Long story just to show a few pictures of patchwork balls, huh? Funny.

Every time I think I am so on top of things as far as crafting with my kids goes, something like this comes along and reminds me of how little I know about how kids learn. And how little I really need to instruct. I'm relieved! Are you relieved, too? It's not as daunting as you think, friends - teaching your kid to sew, to make a pattern, to create. I'm proud of what my kids make, yes. But I'm prouder of how they teach themselves to do it. And I am proudest when they get to that moment when they can visualize what they want to make, and sync their hands with their minds to make it happen. That is creating. It's all about the pathways between dreaming and translating. And once they know the pathways, the world is truly limitless.