Picking up from yesterday –
So, I went over to Mia (the little girl who needed help sewing). She told me she was making a doll bed, and wanted someone to sew the mattress. She had fabric and was just looking for something fill it.
We’d been instructed before the day began that if children asked for our help on anything, we were to let them make all the creative decisions. We weren’t to really make suggestions. We were just there to help them realize whatever it was that came into their heads.
I absolutely loved that attitude! Imagination is so important, and so many people lose it. So it’s great to let it fly. Problem solving is also wildly important, and I think can help with practically every job in the world. So, that’s another wonderful skill to build. And kids can’t work very much on their problem solving if we’re trying to solve their problems for them.
So, she said she had the fabric. Before deciding what material went inside the mattress, she wanted to see how big of a mattress she’d need to make. (Smart.) The legs of her bed had finished gluing, so we flipped it over to roughly measure the bed.
When she flipped it, we realized the middle (where she’d joined two things together) dipped. My first instinct would’ve been to add legs to the middle as well… But I couldn’t say anything about that! I didn’t want to take over the project and do whatever I thought was right.
Thankfully, she suggested we add legs to the middle, which was awesome. We took the bed over to the cutting station so the volunteer working there could cut us some legs. While she waited in line for that, she decided to go get some mattress material.
I took this opportunity to quickly look up on my phone a refresher tutorial of how to sew. I was in a music in high school where I had to sew. (It didn’t have to be fantastic. It was just some stage business that I don’t think anyone was paying that much attention to – but obviously I wanted to be as great as I could be.) So, I’d had some experience – but only for a few weeks, and never again after that musical.
I raced through google piecing together a quick tutorial for myself before she came back.
I got my needle ready, was prepared to sew, and greeted her as she came back to meet me at the cutting station.
I’ll pick up here tomorrow.