Counting

It's several months since I gave you a sneak preview of the fabric numbers that I had started to make from Meg McElwee's book Growing Up Sew Liberated: Making Handmade Clothes and Projects for Your Creative Child. You may know Meg from her lovely blog, Sew Liberated, but if you don't make sure you head over there and see the wonderful things she makes for her two gorgeous boys, and also the fun activities that they all get up to.

There's no real reason why these numbers have taken so long to finish as they're not at all difficult. The numbers themselves were cut out using the templates from the book and I chose some pretty stash fabric that I think originally came from my mum's fabric stash. I used bondaweb to attach these to rectangles of old cream coloured bed sheet. The edges of the numbers are picked out using stem stitch in embroidery thread. The idea here, from Montessori principles, is that children can run their fingers over the outline of the numbers when learning them. My embroidery skills are not great and it is noticeable how, with practice, the sewing on the higher numbers is far better than it was on number one.

Once the hand sewing was complete I formed "sandwiches" for each of the numbers which consisted of a middle piece of felt and a second piece of cream bed sheet on the back to complete it. Everything is held together by a row of running stitch set in from the edge and then by zig-zag stitching around the edges themselves. The book suggests using seam sealant around the edges to ensure that they can withstand lots of handling. I tried this on one of the numbers, but actually found that it gave them a rough hard edge. I much preferred a tactile fabric finish so decided not to use it on the other numbers. 

My plan is to use wooden clothes pegs to attach these numbers to a pretty ribbon that I have so that Little Miss C can see the numbers whilst she is playing and so that we can easily get them down when she wants to play with them. She's currently learning to count and I want to try to introduce these whilst she does so that the learning of the numbers themselves follows on from that naturally.

I'm really pleased with how the numbers turned out. The small, detailed pattern on the fabric I used for the numbers works well and I'm glad that I chose to make all the numbers from the same fabric rather than using different ones for each number. One idea for a follow-up project is to do something similar for the alphabet. It would take longer to make, and then of course there is the question as to whether to use lower or upper case letters. An extension to the numbers could also be to make some more numbers and mathematical symbols for when LMC is ready to start doing some basic maths.

Now this project is finished I'm finally going to allow myself to look at some of the other projects in the book. There are so many fantastic things in there that I'm itching to get sewing again. It might be a bag next, or maybe some pyjamas for LMC. There are so many inspiring ideas and I love the way that all the non-clothing items are designed around Montessori education principles. I'm even looking forward to just trying to choose what to do next!