A gown for a giraffe — Mabel’s first machine sewing project

I’ll start with the pictures and then you can read the fine print below if you’re interested in my experience teaching Mabel to sew.

Mabel picked out this fabric a couple of months ago and I told her I’d help her make it into a dress for one of her stuffed animals. It took us three sewing sessions to finish it. I did most of the cutting, and she did nearly all the sewing — I did sew the binding on, because at that point her hands were shaking because she was frightened because Rose had just knocked the hot iron off of the ironing board and narrowly avoided burning herself.

I’m pretty amazed at how easily Mabel manages to sew a nice straight seam on something so small — she just took to it. I was pretty amazed at myself for how patient I was with her, too, until today when she kept turning the other way when I was in the middle of explaining something to her — she’d say “I’m still listening even if I’m not looking at you,” and I’d say “I don’t feel like you’re listening to me if you’re not looking at me.” (Dean and I have this same conversation.) Also, she’d been such an enthusiastic learner at first that I didn’t anticipate it when towards the end of our third session she started saying things like, “I don’t care about learning all about it as long as I can do it” — but by then I had at least gotten to teach her to gather and do topstitching. And even when her attention span was waning, still every time she sat down at the machine, she’d say “I love sewing!”

Samantha the giraffe had been Mabel’s first choice to sew for, but I thought it would be too hard to sew for a giraffe so instead we made the dress for her much-loved pot-bellied pink mouse, (name of Katie,) but then due to my not having a pattern nor any skill at designing, the dress turned out much too wide for Katie — and fit Samantha. (Mabel’s wishing she had named the giraffe “Georgina,” but she feels that stuffed animals don’t like having their names suddenly changed any more than people do.)

Mabel wants a doll now — “not to play with, but just to use as a decoration and to sew clothes for” — and I think that will be fun. (I need to decide which size doll to get, though, because it’s easy to find patterns for 18″ doll clothes, but they take more fabric and probably take longer to sew — but again, since it’s harder to find sewing patterns for smaller dolls, and I really don’t enjoy designing things (and am no good at it, as demonstrated here,) maybe an 18″ is the way to go.

Oh, and one tiny clarification: Mabel had actually made one other project on the sewing machine, a couple of weeks ago — a finger-warmer (for one finger) which she designed herself. She promptly gave it away, but then missed it and would complain to me that her finger (just one finger) was cold and that she needed to make herself another one.

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