Sewing anxiety

Princess is good at sewing. I mean, she's seven, so she's not making prom dresses or anything yet, but she's very good at sewing for her age. She stopped sewing for a while, and she kept telling me that "sewing was boring." She'd get exited about wanting to sew something, but would most likely not start the project, would ask me to do it, or would declare it to be "boring" the first time she ran into any snags. 

Yesterday we finally got over some of that hump. Really what was going on was that she was worrying too much about making mistakes or poking herself with a pin, and it would distract her to the point where she couldn't actually do any work. I also suspect she's like her mom and gets bothered when the project seems overwhelmingly big. 

Anyway, she wanted to sew a fairy dress for a book report. I traced off the simplest pattern I could - basically  a long T-shirt, so there were only four pieces to sew, and I hemmed the collar for her. She struggled with it at first, but when she finally got into sewing, she decided that "sewing makes my brain calm down!"  When she'd start to worry about the next step, she decided that "my brain is too worried - I need to sew to make my brain calm down." And she did. And she finished her project and asked if she could sew some more tonight.