I actually caught a bad cold the day after Christmas & have been laying around the house the last few days like a slug. But it has just about cleared up now, and I'm ready to share a few things I made for Christmas gifts!
First, for my mother and her parents, I made 2 fabric baskets ~ the kind where you wrap fabric strips around a cord (cotton clothesline) and zig-zag stitch the whole thing together. I'd seen a few of these before and wanted to try one. They seem pretty simple, and I already have a ton of small fabric strips left over from my sewing days (when I was also trying to crochet with them). One day mom showed up with a book she had just bought on those exact baskets/bowls, and let me borrow it after seeing how interested I was.
I was in such a hurry to get everything done before we headed out of town Christmas Eve Eve that I only had a chance to snap some quick pictures & hope for the best. I'll have to get some better photos of the smaller brown basket while I still have it this next week, and I'm sure the blue one will be dropping by again with mom during a future visit (the colors are so much prettier in person!). But for now ~
The baskets really are simple to make, and you can find a good tutorial online here. Mom's book was useful for a few tips, but the majority of it was photos & diagrams for different variations, and I ended up liking my two baskets way better than any of the creations in there. Maybe I'm just biased.
I made the blue, purple & green basket large enough for mom to fill with yarn or fabric scraps; it's probably close to 1/2 yard wide. I wanted to make the brown basket even smaller, but to curve back in they have to be at least wide enough to fit over the top of your machine, and this one was snug. Later on I'd like to make another one for myself in red, orange, yellow & purple, but for now we need to re-coop from Christmas a bit!
One more gift to share, but that is for another post...
