The Babies Learn to Stitch

 

Stitching quietly with a fuzzy friend curled up next to you, sleeping peacefully. Is there anything more cozy? Or more unimaginable, if you're raising kittens? Any stitcher who has ever had kittens knows the challenges.

Butterfly and Marigold are our third and fourth kitties. Our first kitty, Shadow, we adopted from a fellow military family who was moving, and decided driving cross country with three kids, a dog, and a cat was too much. They decided to re-home Shadow (thankfully, instead of just leaving him), and we got our first cat. He was 9 years old, huge, black, gorgeously floofy, and the most chilled out gentleman ever. Stitching wasn't a problem.

You all know about Tiger Lily, my heart. She was an extremely calm kitten, and an extremely calm adult. Never bothered anything. No issues with stitching. So having not one, but two, very kitteny kittens has been something of an education. They're good kitties, very sweet temperments, but they were, as most are, very grabby and ever so helpful. They wanted to do all the helping, all the time, with all the things. 

Had I not been outnumbered, I probably would have introduced a single kitten to stitching earlier, but as it was, whenever I tried to do anything with them around, they both mobbed me. I was paranoid about needles and tiny paws and mouths.

My solution was two-fold. First, I decided to wait until they were past the extremely grabby stage and were at the "curious, but if I'm not allowed to play with it, I'll find something else to do" stage. That took a while, but we got there. I was stitching while they were napping elsewhere, but now we can all be together. They come and investigate, but they don't try to play with absolutely everything all the time or crawl all over me.

The second thing I did was buy a hard sided, baby-proof case to sit beside me so that if they became too playful, or if I had to leave the room, I could just plop everything in the case and not worry about them. Marigold is a chewer, and Butterfly is a digger and tunneler, so I wanted something sturdier than a regular stitching bag. I ended up with this:

I got it on Amazon. It's actually a make-up travel case, but it's more like a mini suitcase. 

It holds a nice-sized project.

If I need to, I can just lay my project in there, close the lid, and remove the temptation. It makes for a very calm, stress-free environment where little ones don't learn bad habits and mama doesn't worry about needles and scissors and magnets. We are still working on "mine and yours" generally, but they have already come a long way in learning that needlework is mine, though they do contribute specialty fibers.

Don't know if you have kittens in your future--and really, who does? they tend to just appear--but I thought I'd share a couple of ideas that might help make the kitten/stitching integration process less exciting.

Happy Stitching!