Teaching Pre-School Sewing

Just a quickie today as I'm putting together a Christmas in July Tutorial (I know - seems FAAAAAAR too early to think about Christmas!!)

But last week and the week before I went into my son's nursery class to teach them some sewing - they LOVED making their creations. (You may remember that I did this last year with my daughter when she was in the pre-school class)

The first week was quite simple, they just sewed a heart onto a background using a simple running stitch:

I then added their names, using a sharper needle as I'd had to punch holes in the felt for the kids to sew using plastic needles.

The the following week they made piggie finger puppets, which they LOVED doing and according to all the Mums & Dads, they were incredibly proud of their puppets, which made my heart sing!

Patrick's Girlfriend :-)

Just like his Mummy, Sewing & Chatting!!

Can't caption the two pics above, but they are Patrick's best friend and his girlfriend!! It's SO cute how much these 4 love each other!

Anyway, I digress.... for the pig finger puppets, I made up the faces & ears and punch the holes in the puppets and then the kids sewed them up, using plastic needles again and with a whip stitch (mostly!!)

What's also really fantastic is that the nursery owners have asked me to go back next year, when I won't have any children at the nursery! Will be so nice as this age are SO excited to be doing new things and show such joy when they do it well!

Now.... for me, back to Christmas decorations!!

How to Make Your Own Diwali Crafts

Happy Diwali!!

I've just spent the morning with my daughter's reception class and my son's pre-school class experiencing Diwali with 35 children - it was loud, chaotic, messy and great fun - just like all my experiences of Diwali!

I should probably explain, although I don't really look it, I am half Indian. My Dad is a Sikh and although he was born in England my Grandparents moved to London from the Punjab (which was then part of India, although now is part of Pakistan) in the 1940s during Partition.

I love all things Indian and it plays a big part in our lives, especially as we now live in Gloucestershire which is an area that doesn't have a lot of the culture locally, so we have to make sure that our children experience it at home.

So for Diwali, we have all the candles in the house lit, we decorate the patio with rangoli patterns (although yesterday was a bit too wet, so we'll have to do it tonight after school) and we eat traditional Indian sweets (a real luxury as they are so rich normally we don't have them - or none of us would be able to move for a week!)

Rangoli patterns are usually made from coloured rice flour

Diwali is the festival of light to welcome home Rama & Sita from the Forest

Gulab Jamun Sweets

So today I took into School some of these delicious Gulab Jamun sweets, bought specially at the weekend, they are sinfully rich, but so yummy - most of the children were happy to try them although not all of them liked them, but my two had second helpings (of course!)

The activities that their lovely teacher came up with included making clay pots, called Divas which hold the candles, traditionally lit to welcome Rama & Sita back from the Forest. These were made from air drying clay, which was rolled into sausage shapes and then curled round in a spiral to form the base, then another sausage shape was curled round to form the walls. Lastly some sparkly sequins and blingy hearts were added to decorate the pots.

Patrick's Diva

Seren's Diva

They coloured in colourful hands to depict the mendhi patterns drawn onto ladies hands with henna and the made rangoli patterns on the playground with coloured powder paint. The hands were made from coloured paper which the teacher had cut out and then they copied (ish!) some tradition mendhi patterns using felt pens.

The kids LOVED it! I'm so pleased to have been able to be a part of their day and really pleased to be able to share some of my heritage with a group of children who otherwise probably wouldn't have any connection to this festival.

UK Handmade Interview & a Day at Pre-School

I forgot to mention a couple of weeks ago that I had been interviewed by the lovely and ever-so patient Kirsten Miller of UK Handmade for their Road Less Traveled series. I was a little bit nervous as it's the first proper interview I've done since starting Grace's Favours but it wasn't scary and the end result is something I'm really really pleased with and as soon as I can work out how to I'll be adding a "Press" section to the website!

to see the rest of the pics (and read the words!) click here

The other thing I wanted to share this week was the session I did at my daughter, Seren's, Pre-School class. Her teacher (who knows what I do for a living) asked if I would be interested in going into the nursery for a day to teach the Pre-School children how to sew! I was delighted to be asked and decided that I would get them doing a basic sampler like this:

Flower sampler

So I cut out a square of material for each child and machine stitched round the edges so it didn't fray once they started sewing. Then I drew the flower in 4 different colours (green stalk & leaves, orange centre, red for one set of petals and purple for the other set of petals)

I'd ordered a batch of large plastic needles and some embroidery threads in different colours and armed with all of this I set off for nursery on Tuesday morning.

Seren was beside herself with excitement and all her friends (actually, thankfully only 6 of them and 2 staff members!) were really enthusiastic about their "lesson"

Here are some pics from the day:

Great concentration from the boys - surprisingly!

Seren (in the heart dress) very keen to get every stitch right!

Mary: Are you sure I'm showing him right???

Sue: I'm sure I can do this!

One of the best results!

Stopped for lunch and a play, great progress!

They all worked SO hard, I was really proud of all the children! We didn't quite finish our projects in the day (interspersed with playing, running round outside and many pit stops for food and drinks!) so I'm going back in a fortnight's time to help them finish off.

I really really enjoyed my day with the kids, but my god, was I exhausted at the end of it!! I have a newfound respect for Nursery Staff!

Now pootling over to Handmade Monday now for a mooch round to see what everyone else has been up to this week!