Thursday, October 15th, 2009
T has been showing an increasing interest in my knitting of late. It’s gone from help feeding me the yarn, to interest in manipulating the needles, to a somewhat maniacal scissor experience on Tuesday when she really wanted to snip the tangled part. After the blood-draw, I started thinking about safer ways for her to participate, and then I remembered this little gizmo that I bought during the summer sales. I intended to save it for Christmas–and I really don’t know how anyone “saves” purchases from these sales for more than a few weeks–but the time was right yesterday.
I wish I could have taken a picture of her doing it, but my fingers are still essential for the process to work. We worked on the chain for almost two non-consecutive hours yesterday–clearly a hit. It’s a bit too much for small hands to master so I hold the spool and do the initial wrapping around the prongs and she lifts the loops with her “needle.” We changed colors a few times and waiting to see the new color emerge from the bottom of the spool proved to be a big motivator.
It’s started me thinking about other fiber-related skills she might try at this age. Perhaps one of those potholder makers? As for me, I might have to get one of these for myself, or possibly start amassing a collection of vintage ones. I’ve always hated making i-cords and wrapping yarn around a cute mushroom will be a good solution.
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Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008
T is really into letters these days. She’s also not into napping. She’s just beginning her short adaptation stints at the creche and the weather’s been off, so that leaves many extra hours of at-home mischief-prevention each day. While she was eating lunch the other day, I started cutting letters out of junk mail and she was entranced. I didn’t really have a plan, but after her exploration of the medium of glue while we were making C’s birthday decorations, I figured glue + letters = good time.
We cut a shopping bag in half (makes for easy art hanging later on), I added dabs of glue, and she added the letters. She quickly ran through my first batch, and I was forced to dive into the New Yorker stash to re-supply her. It became clear early on that small letters were too frustrating. Her fingers were quickly full of glue and they got stuck too easily. As it turns out, not much large typeface in the New Yorker, but I must have cut up at least three or four instances of the word “Yorker”.
We had fun–both of us. We kept the forced spelling to a minimum, leaving it at Mama, Dada, Nancy (the girl is obsessed with Fancy Nancy since my mom sent her Nancy’s latest: Fancy Nancy Bonjour Butterfly). Otherwise, I just tried to meet her demands for “another F” or “little F” or “big green F”.*
If you’re looking for a rainy day toddler time suck, I recommend, and if letters aren’t your thing, glue + scraps have worked just as well for us.
*F is her most-identified letter these days, hopefully no relation to the fact that she’s been dropping the F-bomb left and right lately. Do we really curse that often? Or is it as she says: “I’m trying out new sound, ‘fok’. Fok, fok, fok, fok. Mama, you like this sound?”
Posted in art with t, craft and art | 3 Comments »
