Sewing with Kaylee

When I was a teenager, I learned how to make a basic quilted lap blanket with my youth group. It was a lot of fun and I still have it today. After a few years of borrowing my great aunt’s sewing machine, my grandmother bought me my own. I treasured that machine so much that I hauled that thing back and forth to college three years in a row sewing up all sorts of things.

Fast forward a few years and I get married and we start having kids. While I did make a few things for our oldest, we were given so many boy clothes that I really didn’t have a need to sew anything for him. When our daughter came along, I was all over making her cute little dresses. Now that she’s getting a bit older, she’s showing an interest in sewing. For her birthday and Christmas, she got a bunch of different kits that included knitting looms, hand sewing kits for beginners, cross stitch kits, and even her first real sewing kit with a pack of fat quarter fabric. She was on cloud nine.

We discovered that my cousin’s daughter was getting to the age where she likes to play with dolls, so I whipped up one of the Barnacle Buddies dolls from Made for Mermaids pattern company.  My daughter insisted that we needed to make her some clothes because you can never have enough, so off we went to our sewing stashes and patterns to see what we could come up with.

She excitedly pulled out her stack of fabric from her new sewing kit. We looked through my pattern book and found the peasant dress for 18-inch dolls. I helped her lay out the fabric and pin the pattern down. She traced around the edge and cut it out all by herself. After teaching her how to pin two pieces together, we decided that it needed a little something to make it feel special, so we cut a strip of fabric, ironed some pleats into the bottom end, and sewed it on the front of the dress.  She did a pretty good job of keeping the fabric centered under the presser foot as we went down the front of the dress.  Next, I taught her how to properly sew buttons onto the front, even though they are just for decoration.

While my daughter is still young and not ready to just be let loose with a sewing machine, she is learning skills that could be essential in the future.