mother and daughter crochet

I taught Lily to crochet when she was around seven or eight. Of course, those early lessons pretty much consisted of chain stitching and a bit of single crochet. 

As she practiced and became better at the basics, I began to teach her more stitches. She made many little purses and bags. She made miniature afghans and pillows for her dolls and monkeys. She even made herself a Lily-sized afghan for her bed. 

Then came the opportunity for her to learn to crochet in the round. For that skill, I taught her how to crochet a hat, which she pretty much did completely independently once I got her started.

Last week, I found a cute little kit that came with a pattern book for twelve different crocheted animals as well as enough yarn and materials to make two of the patterns. When I saw that one of the patterns was for a monkey, I snatched the kit up because Lily LOVES monkeys. 

We sat down last Friday for our first lessons in crocheting stuffed animals. Of course, almost all of it is done in the round, and I have found teaching the magic ring technique to be quite challenging. It's one of those skills that just kind of flows without me thinking of it, so when I was attempting to slowly demonstrate and explain it to Lily, I found I was all thumbs! 

We did get started though, and she completed the mouth portion and both ears during our first lesson. She had so much fun, and was so proud of what she had done that, of course, the first thing she did when her daddy walked through the door after work, was to show him her work. 

I've decided that this is going to be our little winter project. While she was working on the monkey, I sat next to her crocheting what was supposed to be one of her birthday gifts ~ a rainbow striped afghan. Despite the fact that I started this afghan at the beginning of December, progress was extremely slow because of my Christmas-time orders as well as the fact that I could only work on it at night after she had gone to sleep. 

Since her birthday is this Saturday, I could see that the chance of me finishing this afghan (which I had made big enough to fit on her double bed) was highly doubtful so I hesitantly pulled it down out of hiding and broke the surprise. She was absolutely delighted and could have cared less that one of her gifts was no longer going to be a surprise. I was slightly bummed (I am a huge lover of surprises!) However, we have a few other nice things for her and she is having a little party with some of her friends. So all is good.