I made a video today with a close friend’s granddaughter who is 11.  I’ve never made any crafty things with a pre-teen and it was really an eye-opener for me.  She is going to a country-western concert at our local county fair with two girlfriends.  She and her grandmother had accumulated three cowboy hats for the event that were quite frankly, pretty ugly.  So we took the plastic ribbons and worn out feathers off of the hats before we began videotaping.  In retrospect, that probably wasn’t the best choice as the hats were really ugly and you might appreciate the end product if you’d seen how they began.  Regardless, I thought the time it took to tear things apart would be cumbersome, so we didn’t film it.  My young crafter had very specific ideas of what she wanted on her hats.  She wanted a ribbon, a feather and a safety pin with a couple of beads on it.  The first hat did not go well as she tied her ribbon into a very tight bow, but the ribbon wasn’t long enough to go completely around the hat.  We both did our best, but couldn’t untie the knot.  She finally found enough slack that she could wiggle her ribbon onto the hat, then put her feather where she wanted it.  The last step was the safety pin.  Neither one of us thought about how we would be able to push a pin through a hat made of stiff straw.  It was not going to happen.  So plan B, push the pin through the ribbon. It was easy enough, but we had to take the beads off the pin, push the pin through the ribbon and rethread the beads.  In the end, we maybe had three beads on the pin.  I suggested we take some wire and thread the beads through the wire and wind it around the pin, but our young crafter was not inclined, so the pin went on as is.  The second hat wasn’t hard to do as she had mastered the errors of her ways with the first hat.  Hat three was hers and was black suede.  It had a red glittery ribbon on it and it’s one feather. She found some holes with eyelets that she threaded her pin through and the project was complete.  This isn’t the best tutorial as she had trouble remembering to put the project so it faced the camera and didn’t want to talk loud enough to be heard on video, but all in all, I learned a lot about crafting with a younger crafter.

1.  She wants what she wants
2.  She doesn’t want to be on video talking
3.  She will do things herself including the glue gun, and there is no negotiation

All in all, it was a lot of fun and I think I learned a lot more than she did.  Crafting is a new experience every day, especially when crafting with a buddy.

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