My Handwork Studio ~ A Fashion and Needle Arts Community for Kids!

Handwork - The Most Competitive Sport

Back in 2002 when I was writing my first business plan for an idea that was originally called "The Handwork School of Practical Arts" (then I got over myself), I was looking to list the benefits of kids learning needle arts. Besides the obvious confidence building, development of fine motor skills, commitment to a long term project and the social activity, I erroneously listed handwork as a Non-Competitive Activity. It is only 6 years and thousands of kids later that I’ve learned that Handwork could be listed as an Olympic sport.  Ideally, my vision was of kids sitting peacefully around a table knitting and sharing their stories of their day at school, soft music playing in the background and the gentle clicking of knitting needles as the kids work on the farm animals they are donating to sick children in hospitals. While most of that does happen (look for my upcoming post about donating to charity), I was astonished to learn that kids watched what each other were doing stitch for stitch, row for row often exclaiming how they were finished first or scoring their classmates work with a lowly 7.7 for accuracy. So with dreams of utopia crushed and the cold hard reality of our internal competitive nature smacking me in the face, I needed to develop a language and a strategy for combating this beast.

Rule No. 1: "No speaking badly about yourself or your own work"
Rule No. 2: "No speaking badly about anyone else, either present or absent or their work".

These two rules are actually part of our teachers' manual today. I also felt compelled to have all the kids work on the same project at the same time. I now allow them to individually choose which project they want to make. This solves a lot of problems because everyone is working on something different making it hard to judge their speed and work against one another. So my advice; understand that competition is part of human nature, do what you can to divert attention, and as always when working with kids, go with the flow.