My grandmother taught me; now I'm teaching my daughter.

Arielle embroidered her first picture Saturday.

I've been in the mood to do some needlework lately, so I pulled out a cross stitch project I've been working on for awhile. Arielle has been fascinated by it and keeps begging to help so I decided to give her something to do. I copied a picture of a strawberry from a coloring book of hers and poked holes in it. Then I threaded a tapestry needle with some red embroidery floss, knotted the end and handed the whole package over to her.

Wow! What an incredibly successful project! She worked on that for a good hour, utterly riveted. I can't think of anything else hat has ever held her attention for that long. She did a really good job, too. She figured out a basic running stitch all on her own and outlined the picture very competently. I didn't have to help her out much or give her much guidance at all, which surprised me. The only problem she had was a tendency to get confused and loop her thread around the edge of the paper sometimes.

She wound up doing four pictures this weekend, and is working on a picture of a jack-o-lantern right now. Each time she's shown increasing creativity. She did a satin stitch on her own initiative on the leaf of the apple, and I have just been informed that she has given the pumpkin glasses.

I am blown away. This is so exciting, watching her discover a new talent like this. I'm already thinking about how to teach her some more advanced stitches and wondering if she'll enjoy knitting and crocheting just as much. We'll see. I'll just take it all at her pace. I don't want to take the fun out of it for her by pushing her at all.

But I'm so excited she enjoys this! I'm having a blast sharing this with her.