When I offered to do a workshop at the Knitting & Stitching Show I was fairly certain what I would do with the unsuspecting stitchers signing up for it: the dove’s eye matchbook. It’s aimed at beginners, it doesn’t take too long so in the 90 minutes the workshop takes they should be able to achieve quite a lot, and they end up with something to take home that they can use in their future stitching.

So far so good. But then came the question, “Is the workshop suitable for children?” Rashly I said that yes, it would be fine for children aged 12 and over. There was just one snag. I’d never actually tried it out on a 12-year-old.

Enter my guinea pig Katie, the most suitable 12-year-old you could imagine for this sort of experiment. We’ve done stitching together before (starting when she was about 8), she produced an impressive gym-bag-with-stitched-initial at last year’s Holiday Club, her stitching at the annual Christmas Craft Event is invariably splendid, and she enjoys a needlework challenge. She crochets, too.

So I gave her a Matchbook kit to have a look at, and yesterday afternoon we held a private workshop. A little different from trying to show twelve people what to do, but it would give an idea of whether the kit works for young stitchers. Even if we did interrupt proceedings several times to make the dough for the evening’s pizzas. I decided to work the project at the same time, so I could show her the various stitches, but not to do a single thing for her – getting the fabric into the flexihoop, using a waste knot, counting from the centre to the starting point, working out the direction of the stitches, cutting, it was all her own responsibility. She set to it with enthusiasm and determination.

And here is what she produced, in not much more than the 90 minutes allotted to it: the surface stitching complete and the cutting done; the woven bar and dove’s eye; and the finished matchbook.

What do you think, did Katie prove me right ?