Want to hear a cute and heartwarming story to brighten up your day? A Dutch school teacher created 23 knitted dolls representing her students simply because she missed them all. The pandemic hasn’t only caused overwhelming challenges to the healthcare system but it has also brought social chaos, economic damage, and created the biggest disruption of education systems all over the world. With schools forced to close during the lockdown period, we’ve seen the transition of learning system to online teaching-learning. While most countries have the technology to easily adopt online learning, many learners and students are still having a hard time shifting away from traditional learning which is done in a classroom and interacting with the class face-to-face.
Bored at home during the lockdown, Miss Ingeborg Meinster-Van der Duin, a primary school teacher at Dr. H.Bavinck school in Haarlem, Netherlands, was looking for a way to fill her time when she saw an amigurumi project on Pinterest that instantly inspired her. Amigurumi is the Japanese art of crocheting or knitting stuffed miniature figures. Being good at the craft herself, she decided to create knitted dolls that look like her pupils.
A School Teacher Makes Knitted Dolls That Look Like Her Students Because She Missed Them
“It was all up and running that the school closed. It all hit me like this,” she says. “The children were no longer in school. And I miss them so much.”
Miss Ingeborg crafted each doll while making sure to match the details and outfits of every single one of her pupils. She also included identifiable accessories such as glasses, hair bows, and even freckles. After she completed all 23 knitted dolls, she sent a photo of her creations to her pupils and the kids easily recognized themselves in it. Her pupils loved seeing the ‘yarn version’ of themselves. They only had one complaint though – their teacher wasn’t included and they wanted to see the mini-me of Miss Ingeborg too.
Miss Ingeborg granted their request by knitting a replica of herself, posting a photo of herself holding the tiny doll next to her. She was able to give the knitted dolls to her pupils when the kids recently returned to school to retrieve their things they had left behind before the lockdown. She plans on making another batch of knitted dolls for her new class next year. And after a photo of her creations went viral online, she was bombarded with requests from other teachers to make dolls of their students. Miss Ingeborg had to decline because she would be too busy knitting dolls for her class.