I have a preteen daughter, Meg, who loves craft projects but rarely finishes them. Life for her is all ideas and very little follow-through. Rare exceptions to this include projects that she is completely geeked out about, but make very little practical sense. Like making wings out of duct tape. The kid actually ran a lemonade stand with her sister this summer with the sole intent of buying duct tape to build wings that she was certain would actually make her fly. She finished them and thankfully did NOT proceed to jump off our second-story deck while wearing them.
This past summer when my daughters and I made a pilgrimage to Coveted Yarn in Gloucester, MA, this lovely, bizarre daughter of mine found a ball of yarn that she just HAD to have. This yarn was a funkadelic weird-ass bright orange and yellow yarn that looked like it would be a real pain to knit with, and it went for $11.00 per ball. She had no plan for it, and I knew it would just sit in the yarn stash if she bought it, but she LOVED this yarn and just HAD to have it! So I suggested fingerless gloves with that as the cuff and plain orange normal-looking yarn for the main body of the glove. Yeah, she’d look like a Fraggle, but it’d be just her style, and I already had an easy pattern for such a project.
Soon afterward she started the project. Or rather I started the project on her behalf. She’d never used double-pointed needles before, so she needed help. Then she was annoyed with the ribbing. Long story short, she did NOT want to knit this pair of fingerless gloves.
Fast forward 2 1/2 months to last night. Both daughters really wanted to go with me to my knitting group at Starbuck’s, mainly because Starbuck’s=sweets. My younger daughter already had a project going, but Meg had nothing despite being told that there was no way she’d be going to knitting group without a project. So the 3-rows-in, almost all knit by me, fingerless gloves that she had NO desire to knit became the sacrificial lamb. We decided together that maybe this project wasn’t such a good idea, but that a scarf made of that same funkadelic weird-ass yarn would be really cool and a good match for her quirky personality. SUCCESS! Not only did she knit several rows of the basic garter stitch scarf last night at knitting group, but she actually worked on it today. On her own time. Twice.
Motivation is everything, and in many cases what motivates us is something easy that doesn’t intimidate. Meg found a quick, easy project that will work great for this yarn (God knows not much else will) and is in love with it. Some people are motivated by challenges, others by easier tasks. The important thing to me in this case is that there is a project on the needles that she really loves working on, and that my $11.00 won’t go to waste. And thank God that bizarre yarn won’t be taking up space in my stash!
and it’s so soft and fuzzy…. Glad that she’s following through on it… It looked fantastic last night…
oh and we really like the Fraggles here (are you surprised at all??)
We have an unfinished project problem here as well. Will and I were discussing our dd’s unfinished projects this morning. Her main problem is perfectionism (don’t know where she could have gotten that from). It is truly sad sometimes, because she is so creative and talented. She rips stitches out constantly or scraps craft projects because she has made some unforgivable error. The only upside to this is that we have no mountain of projects to store. She won’t let the evidence of mistakes sit around for others to see. I am hoping her current project will see the light of day. She is making a scarf for her friend back in Ohio.