Love you sew much?

My young friend G is starting to get a bit bored of the dog park.  (Like many of the people in my life, G has an amazing ability to focus on whatever catches our attention at the moment, which translates into restlessness with things that had held our attention a week, day, or hours ago.) 

I myself would love to have G continue to relish the dog park, if for no other reason than there are not a lot of things for a wild child to disarrange there.  Ditto for the playground.  But what I myself would love and what G actually feels can be two different things, and so I am doing my best to find ways to love this kid where they're at.  I'll have to find a way to bring novelty to the dog park/playground in future weeks, but I've also started following the widely-swinging spotlight of temporary focus.

Here's where it led us a few weeks ago: sewing lessons. G had made a flag to celebrate Harry Potter's birthday:  the flag was fabric held together with tape.  I suggested that we might actually have a sewing lesson, which G immediately fixated on (of course! who wouldn't want to sew?). 

So we trundled off to my house.

I let G take the lead on design, within a range of options that was limited only by my stash of scrap fabrics.  G wanted a heart, not red.   I snipped a heart out of fabric from an old seat cover and helped G pin it to some navy blue fabric that used to be a pair of school uniform pants.  Pins are not easy to use, G discovered, but the pin cushion itself offers a range of creative quests.  This, I remembered from many, many kids "sewing" with me:  rearranging pins in a pin cushion is a mesmerizing activity.

When it came to actually sewing things together, the part of the machine that G was fixated on was the pedal: there seemed to be nothing more intriguing in life than stomping on the pedal, and could we please, please do that?  

(For those who do not sew, please note that stomping on the pedal as hard as you can does not usually lead to excellent sewing outcomes, however emotionally satisfying it might be in the moment).  

Fortunately, I could share with G the secrets that there are other awesome parts of the sewing machine over which a young person, sitting on my lap and not stomping on the pedal, could have control.  

• There is the wheel on the side that we use to turn the needle down into the fabric before starting, or when preparing to turn a corner, and that we use to turn the needle up out of the fabric at the end.  
• There is the presser foot, with its secret lever hiding under the belly of the machine, that needs to go down, and then come up.  
• There is the . . . okay, I don't know what it's actually called, because my family calls it the "Loch Ness Monster" . . . the thread guide that bobs up and down to maintain tension on the upper thread, and that needs to be up and visible before we cut threads.  
• There is the fabric itself, that we guide through the sewing process, with our fingers gently on it like it's a ouija board.

G very much liked adding the heart to the fabric, and we agreed that in the future we'd turn this into a bean bag (I happen to have a bunch of cherry pits from this year's cherry picking/pitting, ready for such a purpose).   The week after we added the heart, we used my newer, fancy machine, to add words to the design.  But G's focus had already shifted from sewing to our train tracks, so I'm guessing that sewing lessons have lost their luster already.  

Which is, frankly, a tiny bit of a relief.  I'm figuring if I offer to take action photos, I can encourage G to re-engage long enough to help finish the project together, but then we can move along to other momentary obsessions and adventures. Phew!