Start Them Out Young

This evening I was blocking out some doilies. I've been doing that a lot, lately, and so my box of pins and blocking boards (with me hunched over!) are no new sight to my nearly two-year-old daughter. Usually she goes about her business, playing or watching some. This evening she really wanted to help - and you know what good "helpers" toddlers are!

I got over my fear she would stab herself with a pin quickly - she showed me that she had paid attention to how to carefully pick up pins by the balls at the end, one at a time. She showed me she knew how to push them into the board. At first this was a little annoying, but after a moment I realized that she was actually helping! No, her pins weren't holding out the doily, but they were saving me some time in that I could pluck one of her lopsided pins and pin my section.

Then I noticed the "lopsided pin" I had just plucked was my own! My daughter was getting better at pinning, and put her pins right next to my own.

She's still a little young to teach stitches to, but as soon as she expresses interest I will show her. She loves to "play Mommy" by stabbing at a ball of yarn with a large, plastic hook (P hooks and Q hooks get more use from her than me these days).

For centuries crochet has been passed on from mother to daughter, friend to friend. How many of us can say that we learned to crochet from our grandmother, aunt, or mother when we were young? My friend and I taught ourselves to crochet in college from a book (I Can't Believe I'm Crocheting!), and since then I have taught over a dozen people to crochet (four of them male).

Knowing how to do something doesn't make you a great teacher, necessarily, but there are some resources out there for those of us who do crochet to teach those out there who want to learn.

Here are a few links (there are more out there!); post a comment with your additions.

For Teachers

• Each One Teach Two - a site dedicated to sharing the skills of crochet and knit, with guides to teaching and a teacher reward program
• Crochet Guild of America (CGOA)'s Teaching a Child to Crochet - click here for the main page
• Craft Yarn Council of America (CYCA)'s Teaching page - includes tips from the pros

For Learners

• LearnToCrochet.com
• LearnToCrochetEasily.com
• Crochetville.org - this is a great support site for crocheting. There are crocheters of all levels of proficiency, and they are great cheerleaders, hint givers, and "pattern to 'regular English'" translators

Labels: crochet

posted by Anonymous on Sunday, October 08, 2006 @ 10:04 PM

2 Comments:

 Unknown said...

OK, OK! :-) I've set the record straight! Here you go! 11:28 PM  

 Unknown said...

Please don't post ads on my blog - even in the comments. 4:39 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home

All Content ©2006,2007 Kate Dohl (KateCrochets)
Design ©2005 Pat Heard