Gift Scarves

Part of my plan for this past Christmas involved creating a lot of gifts myself. For the women on the list, I was inspired by a Scrunchy T-Shirt Scarf tutorial I found on Pinterest. It sounded simple enough – cut up a t-shirt, run a couple of lines of elastic thread, and done! Of course, if you know me at all, you know it wasn’t that simple.

I opted to buy some knit fabric rather than hack up t-shirts, mainly because I wanted to work with 2 yds of length due to the scrunch factor. After a bit of trial and error, I decided to increase the width of the fabric from the 10 inches on the site to 14 inches – it made the scarf feel fuller.

The elastic thread didn’t work for me at all. It may have been operator error – I’m not sure the tension on my sewing machine was set correctly. I finally found that by using the regular thread in a long basting stitch and not back-stitching on one end, I could pull one of the threads, causing the ruffle. After I had pulled enough to achieve the amount of ruffle I wanted, I knotted the thread several times and snipped off the extra.

I was pleased with the result, though I didn’t end up making as many as originally planned. Why, you might ask? Because I had a sewing machine accident while working on scarf number two that resulted in a trip to the urgent care for finger x-rays and bandaging. When we returned from there, I replaced the broken needle on the machine and finished up the bare minimum number of scarves I HAD to have to complete gifts.

Literal blood, sweat, and tears went into this project. I hope the gifts were appreciated.

The Inspiration (from favecrafts.com)

My version, in a heap on my unmade bed (click to enlarge)

My version in action (click to enlarge)

At some point, I should start putting a little more effort into photos, huh?

Overall, I’d say this is a very simple and quick project with great results, assuming you don’t run your finger through your sewing machine like I did. That definitely slows things down and kind of ruins the cost-savings idea.