Friday, December 18, 2009

Cross-Stitch in da Hiz-zouse

"X-Factor Stitching"
For some months now I've [not me, read the link] been hatching a plan with the peace activist Vijay Mehta to supply crochet hooks to disaffected, troublesome youths so that they can learn to make something with their hands.

I've joked that we must stop them carrying knives and get them to carry crochet hooks instead....

Jacqueline Holdsworth, told me she'd recently spent a weekend at a Costumes and Textiles Fair working with children and teaching them cross-stitch (to make this sound more exciting than they might otherwise think, she called it X-Factor Stitching).

2 comments:

Nic said...

When my knitting group knits in the pub, it's always the (young) blokes that are fascinated and ask us what we're doing.

I think perhaps we need to carry spare needles and yarn and get them to work on a row or two...

Not sure I like the name X Factor, but I think I'm allergic to reality shows ;o)

(Word verification = crosi - another potential new name?)

riona said...

The 4th grade teacher at our parish school used to teach her students to crochet an afghan. She'd teach the basic stitch at the beginning of the year and then, anytime the children needed to be quiet [e.g.: when she was reading a literary classic to them, when one of the students finished a test or other activity before the rest of the class, waiting in line, recess on rainy days] they'd whip out their afghans and work away. She did this well into the 90s and only stopped when members [mostly male] of the Home School Guild complained. To this day, she claims that those students who crocheted were more self disciplined and well-behaved, better capable of focusing on a task, had more active and creative imaginations as well as better eye-hand coordination and more control of small motor movements leading to more legible hand-writing. The Montessori schools have always made domestic skills a part of their curricula for all of these reasons as well as the obvious one: the practical development of an ability to do the routine daily housekeeping we all have to do.

Don't you just love it when some bright-eyed young thing "discovers" a profound truth that we have known all along?