Easy Sewing Project for Kids: Flags

Happy Flag Day!! I have the perfect project for you or little people in your life. I am having a craft day at my job at the local library. On Friday mornings, kids come in for craft day. Kids come in from 9-11, and we do a craft. Typically, the craft can take anywhere from 30-60 minutes. It’s for school-aged kids. I am doing okay with coming up with ideas. Although, please share some if you have some…

I had an idea after watching a reel on Instagram.

She was making a cute flag garland. She was ripping fabric into the needed sizes and then hot-gluing the pieces down. I thought it was cute and even considered making one, but then thought…nope. Why wouldn’t I put a line of stitching down each piece? Yes. That would be cute. Then I reminded myself I should probably do the projects I had going and really, where would I hang it? I don’t even have my patriotic decor out anyway. Just in case…I took a screen shot.

So on with my day.

As I was working, I thought to myself about the flag garland. Maybe I do want to make it. I could likely make it in an hour. Hmm.

It just so happened that it was on a Tuesday and on Tuesday’s I take care of my daughter Kalissa’s kids over the summer. Hmm. Maybe I could make the garland while they were here and they could help me.

WAIT!!! I had an idea. I would have the kids sew flags. They would take the pieces, and they would do the sewing and we’d attach the flag to a dowel. Well, that might be a little ambitious. Could they use the sewing machine? It was time to give it a try. I ran upstairs to the sewing room. I grabbed some fabric.

The Instagrammer didn’t give any measurements, so I took a guess and came up with some. I decided I needed:
One white rectangle 5 1/2″ x 8″
Two red rectangles 1″ x 8″
Two red rectangles 1″ x 4 1/2″
One blue rectangle 3″ x 4″

Carver was the first one to try. He’s eight and did great. Well Gannon started whining that “Carver got to make one”. So I helped Gannon.

He was a pro!!

Then my daughter Kelli came with her three kids. Georgia had to make one! She did better with the sewing machine than the scissors! HA!

Not to be outdone…Eli and Emmett insisted on making one.

They were little enough that we had to improvise. We put the foot pedal on a box I have. It worked great. We did most of the guiding…the kids put the presser foot down and ran the pedal. They actually did really good.

Emmett thought he didn’t need any help as he had watched everyone else. Wrong.

I thought I would show a little more detail about what we did. Using the pieces in the sizes I mentioned above, we laid the pieces as you see them in the photo below. The kids sewed one line from edge of the red fabric to the other edge of the red fabric.

Next put the blue rectangle in place and have them stitch near the edge along each side.

Being I was flying by the seat of my pants, I didn’t have dowels to attach these to. Then it hit me…skewers. I got my garden clipper out and cut off the pointed end. You can get skewers HERE if you don’t have them. I wanted something quick so I used hot glue to put them together.

While we sewed we talked to the kids and called the presser foot a pincher that pinches the fabrics together. We talked about learning to keep your needle down and pivot. So fun!!

The kids loved it. Here are Gannon, Eli, Georgia, Anders (he’s holding Carver’s flag), and Emmett.

I am going to put a link in the tutorial section on the right side of the blog so you can always come back to this post.

I figure, being many of you are moms, or grandmothers, or aunts, you might like an easy sewing project to do with kids. After all, if we encourage the art of sewing and quilting, who will?

I’m still thinking about ripping the fabric and making a garland…it’s so cute. The Instagrammer also showed this…

It’s from Amazon. There is a link for it HERE. I thought about modifying this and doing something like this with the kids too. Maybe they could be extra-long ribbons/fabric and the kids could tie them on. Hmm. I’ll save that idea for next year!!

It was a great project. Let me know if you give it a try.