Button T-shirt

I knew the granddaughter wanted to make a button shirt – she had, after all, spent an hour carefully selecting buttons from the bin at the fabric store. But when I handed her a needle to thread and waited for her to thread it, she insisted, “I can’t do it!”
She proved her point by poking a couple inches of thread at the needle’s tiny hole. I showed her again how to hold less of the thread, aim it at the eye of the needle and pull it through. I undid the thread in the needle and went back to working with her sister.
I knew she did not know how to thread a needle. That’s why I suggested creating a button decorated T-shirt – to teach the basics of sewing by sewing at least half a dozen buttons onto a T-shirt. Through the project, the child would learn handle a needle and thread and fix a loose button.
She tried another time, threw the shirt and needle down and ran to her bedroom, closing the door emphatically.
I worked with her sister as she sewed a couple of buttons at the neck of her T-shirt. She smiled as if she had conquered a mountain. “I did it.” Yes, she had, including the times her needle snagged the shirt material a couple inches away from the needle.
The other granddaughter returned and placed two buttons on the front of her shirt, “Look Grandma, eyes.”
She designed a smiley face with blue button eyes, a button nose and several red buttons forming a smile and two large pink buttons for cheeks. She marked her shirt with ink dots to show her where to sew on the buttons.
I yielded and threaded her needle once for starters and showed her how to go up from the bottom then down through the top to attach a button.
While she sewed, the third grandchild joined us. She wanted to create a garden of flowers at the base of her T-shirt and a yellow sun with rays above it. The middle sister sewed turquoise buttons in a necklace around the top of her shirt. Inside the T-shirt she anchored each button tightly with mounds of thread. They sewed a while, put the buttons and shirts in the basket and went to play.
The next afternoon they gravitated to the basket of T-shirts, thread, needles and buttons and sat down without my prompting. I snapped a photo of the three of them bent over their T-shirts, stitching away earnestly. As the number of buttons increased, I untangled a few loops of thread that had lassoed adjoining buttons and rescued them when they sewed their shirts shut.
“Everyone does this when they sew,” I assured them as I cut buttons loose so they could start over again.
Very early one morning, as I worked at the computer, enjoying the silence of the house, the turquoise button necklace designer wandered out. “I’m hungry, Grandma.”
I offered her cereal. She ate, washed her face, picked up the T-shirt and sewed on a couple more buttons and declared, “That’s all I’m going to seew on it. I’m still tired, Grandma. I’m going back to bed.” Sounded like a good idea to me.
After work, I found the shirts on the couch. A finished smiley face of buttons sported a hem liberally dotted with colorful buttons.
“You have added a lot of buttons!” I said
“I am going to sew them all around the bottom and on the sleeves,” she announced proudly.
She – and her sisters – had learned that they can thread a needle and sew on a button.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times.)