On the New York set of the film Hide and Seek, ten-year-old Dakota Fanning spends her time playing a deeply disturbed girl who deals with her mother's suicide   by creating an imaginary friend, who may not frighten her family. Today, though, she has the day off. "This week I only worked two days,"says Fanning, sitting in a sofa in her hotel's library, "but I get bored when I'm not working. Especially because it's cold here and I can't do anything, you know? So, I've been knitting   --- all day, every day."The actress, who's held her own opposite Oscar winners such as Sean Penn and Denzel Washington, recently mastered the fine art of scarves  . Though she's about ready to move on to hats, she first plans to make a souvenir   scarf for Robert De Niro, who plays her father in the film. "He's the nicest guy you'd ever meet in your entire life,"she says, her voice dropping to a whisper. "I would make him a brown one." Like any other fifth-grader, Fanning spends several hours a day going to school. In addition to her personal trailer   --- which is kept well-supplied with hot chocolate packets, lemon Gatorade, and a TV that doesn't always work --- she has another trailer where her teacher, Jan, conducts classes in history, spelling, reading, math, science and health. "We have this big board where we have a calendar  ,"Fanning says. "When we were here in January, I wrote the calendar in all blue. February was red, and March was green." On this particular morning, she had a spelling test. "There was a topic for each of the word lists,"she says, sitting on her knees. "This one was flowers --- they were all names like oxygen, carbon dioxide, chrysanthemum  ..."Chrysanthemum? "Well, they didn't make me spell that one. They just had me fill in the 'e'. But I can spell it: c-h-r-y-s-a-n-t-h-e-m-u-m." Dakota Fanning has to knit all day in order to   _  .
kill time make money master a skill make a scarf for her boyfriend