Along with about ten other kids at his (very tiny) school, Elliot decided that his winter craft would be a scarf (the rest of the kids painted ceramic figures or made papier mache masks). He told me about it a couple of times while he was working on it, but I could not visualize it from his descriptions---he didn't know what to call the cloth that they were using, and didn't know words for the kinds of stitching they were learning.
This past Friday, the last day of school before the winter break, Elliot brought his scarf home--how beautiful it is! It's polarfleece, in a deep olive that is actually very close to the color of my nephew (Elliot and Astrid's cousin) Sam's eyes. The scarf has a beaded pocket at one end (according to Elliot, two of his classmates, identical twin girls, announced that their pockets would be for the IPod Nanos they expected to receive for Christmas....I groaned--not inwardly, either).
My favorite thing about the scarf, apart from the color, is the process that shows through the blanket stitching that Elliot learned how to do as he went around the scarf. It's easy to see where he began---some of the stitches are big, while others are tiny, and they are inconsistently placed. Then, about a quarter of the way around, they become much more even and confident. A little before the end, they start getting kind of ragged again---I didn't ask him, but I bet that Elliot was running out of time, or needed to finish so he could head outside to play kickball at the neighborhood park his school uses for recess time.
I didn't get to see any of the other kids' scarves; I wonder if their creators' personalities show through them as clearly as Elliot's shows through his.
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