Hannah loves to create

She loves crafts!  Any type!  Any time!  I like crafts, but I have to admit that I’m much more picky about the type that I like, and ones that create yet MORE clutter for our house are not the type that I like.  So making another egg-carton caterpillar isn’t really in my line.  However, sewing stuffed animals for cousins for their birthdays is something that I can definitely appreciate. 

I recently got the book Hand-Stitched Felt, by Kata Golda, from our library.  It’s full of fun projects that have also inspired other ideas in fertile brains, and many of them are doable for an ambitious 7-year-old who has a parent who’s willing to help get through rough spots (and look up how on earth to do the blanket stitch on Youtube – they helpfully have a video).  Some of them are doable by Naomi, too, and I’ll show those in a later post.

The local girl cousin had a birthday at the beginning of the month, and Hannah decided that she needed to make a stuffed mouse from the book for her cousin. 

My poor mother, who taught me to embroider, will be happy to hear that, with this project, I was finally forced to learn how to do a French knot.  And Hannah learned, too, much earlier than I did.

She stuffed the mouse herself, too.

And embroidered the face.  She learned the blanket stitch from Youtube in order to connect the stuffed parts together (I don’t think that was one that my mom ever tried to teach me), and the whip stitch to connect the head to the neck.

Local girl cousin seemed to very much like the mouse, which was pronounced to be a lot like Angelina Ballerina.  Hannah has decided that she’s going to make herself a dog, a bunny, a mouse…and maybe a boy dog, bunny, and mouse.  For some reason, I’m hoping that she’ll be needing to make more gifts than things for herself.