Teaching a 7 year old to sew

My friend Ida Mae, has a 7 year old grand daughter. They came over to my house a week or so ago and like most people she was fascinated by my sewing machine and asked me if I could teach her how to sew. I told her yes, I would. Age isn't the most important consideration, to me it was the motivation that was most important. I figured that we would start off with a simple project, a pillow. I had an old pillow case in the closet (can u say FEMA?) that she could use to practice a straight stitch on and away we went. It took her about half an hour to get the hang of it, getting distracted every once in a while, but I steered her back on track and soon she was sewing a pretty good straight stitch.

I set my machine up for embroidery and let her type in her name on the touch screen and watch it come to life on her material. It was a plum colored raw silk for the pillow and a darker plum for the embroidery.

Finally, I let her sew her pillow together, leaving a hole to fill it. I top stitched the edges, then let her fill the pillow with stuffing then sewed the hole closed and below is her and her pillow.

The word is Gucci

Some friends wanted some Gucci fabric appliquéd onto some clothing and this is what I came up with. Since the material was so thick, an old purse cut apart, it presented a challenge when hooping. I overcame this by using a contact stick, water soluble stabilizer. I hooped the garment, with the stabilizer on top, peeled the protective paper off the stabilizer then pressed the Gucci fabric onto it. Then it was just a matter of picking the design to stitch and away we went. I used my Bernina 200/730 for all of the sewing.

Before the storm

Another quick post. This is a picture of my foot before the 10th surgery. Yes I had 9 surgery a on it before this last one. I have started sewing and I almost have one smock finished for the ladies with breast cancer. I'm doing this as charity work for my church. I'll work on it some more after I get the embroidery work done on the stuff for Ida and Perry. Anyway here's the pic.

The big toe is infected in the joint, you can see the swelling

Shopping with gratuitous violence

Well Ida Mae and I went out shopping again today, we didn't get a lot done really. She needed me to repair a purse for her that the zipper had come off we had to get some jewelry pliers to repair it. After we got back to my house it was the work of a few minutes to get it repaired.
Anyway I have a few things from her and her boyfriend that they want embroidered so hopefully I can get started on that tomorrow.
I needed a new pair of scissors as mine have come up missing, I got a new pair of Ginghers so I could get their stuff done without having to struggle with the small embroidery scissors that I have. I'm excited to be productive again. I have spent way too much time hanging around laying on the couch, first with my toe infected and not being able to get the infection under control. Then recovering from sipurgery after they cut my big toe off. Here's a couple of pics, one just after surgery, and now healed.

There has to be a beginning some where

Hi everyone,
I'm just ferrying my mind back into some kind of order and thought I should keep track of my progress.
A friend got in touch with me because of a random post I put on Facebook with a picture of my baby, a Bernina 200/730, she had been trying to figure out how to get in touch with me. She wanted me to help her sew her wedding dress and her bridesmaids dresses. We got together today and started planning. I'm gonna try and post some pictures of what we chose and some samples of the fabric that we're looking for.
Hopefully my writing will get better as I do it more, but we shall see.

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