Gifts made for others

Before Christmas, I was busy making gifts, so I couldn't post pictures because the recipients might be peeking.   Now that they have all been gifted, I can show you the gifts I made for others, at least the ones I remembered to take pictures of - some flew out the door as soon as they were finished!

Let's start with this quilt basket.  No, it's not the one I made earlier this year (or was it last year?) for me to tote things on road trips (it fits perfectly between the front and back seats of our cars).  My brother-in-law saw my basket, and thought it would make a great magazine basket, so I made him this one for Christmas.  The coloring is slightly different, with the stakes and weavers having slightly different shades when it dried.  The shape is also improved over mine, because I've had more practice:-)  For a short while, I thought it might not get finished in time for Christmas, because I managed to break one of the ears that attaches the handle to the basket in my rush to finish it in time. Luckily, the basket supplier was able to get the new handles to me in time to finish weaving and let it dry in time!

 

The pin cushions I made for a couple of my friends, Cathy and Ellen were from the same pattern as this chicken pincushion (pattern by Reets's Rags for Stitches), but I gifted them before taking a picture.  Theirs have a bunny jumping over flowers, and are so cute!

Everyone that saw my apricot / black swirling stars scarf, loved it, and I had read about weavers tying a new warp to one that was already on the loom, so decided to make lots of scarves for gifts, making two from each warp and then tying the next colored warp onto the ends and winding on, so I would be able to make them quicker.  I was amazed how quickly I was able to get the new warps on, and begin weaving again - about 3 hours, tops!!!  The other nice thing was that once the first warp was threaded correctly, I was able to tie on the others without errors, making it not only quicker, but more accurate!  Of course the 8-thread stripes probably helped keep me on track.

One of the blue / black scarves was gifted to my friend Cathy, and the other to a brother-in-law:

The fuchsia and teal scarves went to friends:

One of these black and white scarves went to my sister-in-law, and the other is still to be gifted to a friend.  You can tell from this picture that from each warp I wove one with all stars and if I had enough of both colors, I wove the second as stars with a band that had a rope-like design (same treadling, but only one color weft in that area).  If I only had enough of one of the colors, the scarf was woven with only the rope design.

I thought you might like to see a close-up:

And here's one of the black and white scarves, once the fringe was twisted.

I also wove a black and tan scarf, and also wove off the remaining warp of each colorway, both to experiment with woven colors and also to save for other projects.  A few were long enough that I might have enough for small purses or bags, but I'll decide that later.