Intentional Parents

The three older girls have been doing a lot of knitting projects lately. Evidently, Hannah has been observing them. Today she entered their room and asked, “When are you going to teach me how to knit?”

January 2008: Learning to knit.

Now, I don’t know how to knit, but it looks pretty complicated to me — especially after I sat with Hannah for months while she worked on a needlepoint project. I had to pretty much point to each square in the mesh and tell her whether to come up or go down. So it was a good thing I wasn’t in the room when she asked, for I might have underestimated her.

Getting more comfortable with knitting.

As it was, she sat for more than two hours and knitted a green scarf for her stuffed dog, Blanket. (The names of her stuffed animals and dolls is a whole other story, believe me!) At first her oldest sister had to coach her through each stitch. But after a while, she could do it on her own with just occasional coaching. We asked her on several occasions if she wanted to take a break, but she would reply emphatically, “No, I want to keep going!”

The finished scarf for her stuffed dog.

It was a great opportunity to practice referencing because she would look at her sister to see whether she was winding the yarn the correct way on the needle. Every once in a while she would hold the scarf to her stuffed dog’s neck to see if it was long enough yet. After an hour or so, she was knitting away, looking around, and chattering like she’d done this for years.

Here is the finished scarf. You can bet we had a celebration!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 9:23 pm and is filed under Hannah’s Progress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.