Last Wednesday I was teaching my “Knitting Rocks” kidz’ knitting program at Rae’s. My newest young knitter, K (I met her at a Jen Sygit concert, we were both knitting in public), realized not long before her mom was going to come and get her, that she needed to have Valentines for her parents.

There was no way I could teach her how to knit a heart in that amount of time. My mind raced, and came up with an idea.

We have some sweaters in the storage boxes for the kidz, that I shrunk several times in the washing machine. They can use these for anything they want. Often, my knitters would rather knit than cut and sew, so we access the sweaters infrequently.

I figured maybe we could cut hearts out of a felted/shrunk sweater, if we had any colors that seemed suitable. I thought maybe we had a burgundy sweater.

So I descended the stairs in Rae’s store, and went to the three boxes which store the kidz’ supplies. And we found better things than I had remembered!

There was a small part of a red sweater remaining, and a burgundy sweater that was partly already cut up, some neutral sweaters, and most of a lavender/purple sweater with embroidered flowers.

I could see immediately that the lavender sweater would fit the newest knitter. It had been cut down the middle front already by another child, and the sleeves were cut off at a good short-sleeved length. The fronts were chopped up from someone making a pair of mittens once, but the top section was whole.

I put it on the child and she liked it. We took it off her shoulders and I cut the bottom as straight as I could, and then we decided to round off the corners of the front like a bolero or shrug. She LOVED it. I think she looks adorable, don’t you agree?

Oh… and after the fun shrug adventure? We cut out red felt hearts. Those turned out great for her Valentine project.

Everything turned out even better than we could have imagined. Isn’t it nice when things work out so well?

This entry was posted on Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 10:11 amand is filed under Kids who Knit, Miscellaneous Artforms. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.