Gifts for Crafters Who Have Everything

Their craft room is full. The yarn's sorted by colour and every bottle on the paint rack has its slot. The fancy scissors you bought last year went in a drawer with two other pairs.

What to buy the crafter who has everything is the tool they'd never buy for themselves. Each one below has its own write-up, linked from its entry. One comes from an operating theatre, one from a lab bench and one from the sweater drawer.

Most are small gifts for crafters, the kind that fits in a stocking.

Lights the lap only

A light that sits on their shoulders

The knitter who works by the TV with the lights down has probably tried a camping headlamp. It pinches, and it blinds whoever's on the sofa. The better light sits lower down.

In a dim living room lit by the TV, Digby squints on the sofa with a camping headlamp strapped round his head, its beam flaring off to the side and his knitting dropped in his lap.

The Glocusent neck light is a U-shaped band that rests on the shoulders, with a bendy LED head on each end pointing at the lap. Some knitters had never heard of one.

For anyone who knits, crochets or hand-sews in the evening. Owners knit by one in a dark room, and in the back seat of the car.

See how owners wear a neck light while they knit.

Mixed in thirty seconds

A lab mixer for the miniature painter

Somebody with a bonus coming asked which luxury buy for a painting desk had been worth it. The first answer came out of a lab.

Close up from the side, Digby presses a dropper bottle down onto a small rounded mixer with a dark cup and watches with a small pleased smile as the raspberry paint swirls up the walls of the bottle.

It was a vortex mixer. Press a pot of paint onto the rubber cup and the motor swings it in a tight circle. Thirty seconds to a minute, against five minutes or more of shaking by hand.

For the painter whose rack is heavy with whites, reds, metallics or Contrast paints, or whose bottles sit a fortnight between sessions. Nobody in the thread calls it essential, which is what makes it a present.

The LabGenius is the one a Polygon editor and a long-term owner both keep. The ONiLAB MX-Mini is the cheaper one an owner is happy with.

There's a knack to starting a bottle so it mixes.

Kinder on sore thumbs

A diamond painting pen for hands that hurt

An hour with the kit pen is thousands of pinches and presses, and an arthritic thumb quits long before the canvas does. The painters who keep going found two fixes.

Close up from the side, Digby's relaxed paw holds a slim pale wand with one tiny red gem on its tip at the canvas. A clear hose curves away across the table, and the thin stylus lies unused by the tray of gems.

A fatter pen answers the pinch, and the Benote is the one they found.

A vacuum pen answers the press: suction holds the gem, so there's no wax and nothing to push. The Picmondoo keeps its pump on the table at the end of a hose, so the hum stays off the hand. The hose also takes a thick pen, for both fixes at once.

For the diamond painter with arthritis, neuropathy or hypermobility. Ask which hurts more, the pinch or the press, before you order. The cordless vacuum pens buzz in the hand, and for some hands that's the whole problem, which is why the hose kind is the one here. The rest is in the pen comparison for sore hands.

One coat on pale colours

A light pad for paint-by-numbers

Yellow again, and the number still shows through after the second coat. The painters who got fed up with it hide every number on purpose, then bring them back.

A canvas painted white lies flat on the table with its outlines and numbers glowing faintly through from underneath and a line of light along its edge, while Digby holds a brush loaded with yellow just above it.

They cover the whole canvas with white gesso until the numbers vanish, then slide a light pad underneath and the numbers come back. A lot of colours go on in one coat after that.

For the paint-by-numbers painter who's sick of second coats on every pale cell. The pad is the one sold for diamond painting, so it serves two crafts. Beginners get told to buy clear gesso, which hides nothing, so make sure the bottle says white.

For a painter who only wants the odd stubborn number gone, a white paint marker is the smaller gift. All three ways to hide the numbers are ranked side by side.

Good for twenty years

Brush soap that outlives the brushes

Somewhere in a painter's drawer is a handful of brushes they gave up on. They may not be done yet.

Close up from the side, Digby cups a small round pot and draws a wet brush across the cake of soap in it, white lather rising round the bristles, a bowl of water beside him.

It takes a cake of soap in a small pot. Wet the brush, swirl it on the cake, lather, rinse.

One painter's first pot of the Masters Brush Cleaner is twenty years old and still saving brushes. Another brought fifteen or twenty brushes back from a drawer in one evening, points and all.

For anyone who paints with sable or any natural-hair brush. The brush it protects costs more than the soap does, which is why the bluntest reply in the thread calls skimping here false economy.

A painter with cheap synthetics does fine with dish soap, so check the brush jar before you buy. The thread draws a line where brush soap starts to matter.

Strands that stay apart

A knitting thimble for colorwork

Two strands in one hand twist, tangle and knit up uneven. What colorwork knitters pass around is a ring that sits on one finger.

At a kitchen table under a warm lamp, Digby tilts his head at the raspberry and amber yarn tangled round his raised paw, a half-knitted hat on the needles in his other paw and the two balls rolled to opposite ends of the table.

A Norwegian knitting thimble goes on the index finger with a channel for each strand, so the two colours feed to the needle without crossing. One knitter said three-strand work felt more like one-strand knitting with it on.

For the Continental knitter who wants both colours in the left hand. Two-handed knitters have no use for one. Ask how they hold their yarn before you buy.

The one to give is Clover's yarn guide. A knitter who had to wad tissue into a plastic thimble to keep it on rates the Clover much better.

Another, with fingers too small for the usual thimbles, says it's small enough to stay on. Keeping a ring thimble on takes a rubber-band trick.

For the tiniest letters

A pin pen for the Cricut crafter

Everyone on YouTube seems to weed their vinyl with the same pen. The person who asked the forum what it was called had spent a year with the blunt stock hook instead.

Digby peers worriedly at a sheet of raspberry vinyl, a blunt hook in one paw and a tiny torn letter lifting away with the scrap he's peeling back.

It's a pin pen, a needle point inside a ballpoint barrel that lifts the scrap away from the cut letters. One click puts the point out and one puts it away.

For anyone cutting small vinyl letters or glitter vinyl. A hook needs an edge to get under, but the dot over an i has none. A needle goes into the piece and lifts it out.

Some crafters make their own from a dollar-store mechanical pencil and a sewing pin. The gift is a proper one with a cushioned grip and spare needles, because the point dulls.

It's sharp enough to hurt. The click is the safety, so the one rule is to retract it every time it goes down. For the very smallest cursive, one owner swaps the pen for long needle-nose tweezers.

Pull with the arm

A surgical clamp for the hand quilter

The needle is halfway through a stack of layers and the fingers keep sliding off it. Quilters and embroiderers borrowed the answer from the operating room.

Seen from above, Digby sits relaxed at the quilt hoop with a faint smile. A small scissor-handled clamp in one paw holds the needle's tip and draws it up out of the layers, red thread following, while his other paw rests on the hoop's rim.

They pull it with a hemostat, the locking clamp a surgeon uses. Squeeze it onto the needle, hear it click, and the thing in your hand is a handle you pull with your arm.

For the hand quilter or embroiderer whose hands hurt or just can't pinch any more. A veterinarian who got tendinitis from a hexagon quilt went back to stitching this way, thumb kept neutral. It's cheap, and the one most likely to get a laugh before it gets used.

Buy the plain straight one with no scissors built into the jaws, because the blade cuts the thread while you're grabbing the needle. The pushing finger has a fix of its own, rubber grips for pulling the needle.

For a tidier back

An eyeless needle for the cross-stitcher

A tail of floss keeps surfacing on the front of the work, and unpicking a mistake leaves the holes clogged with fuzz. One small tool sorts out both.

Digby sits in a deep armchair under a lamp with an embroidery hoop, poking with a sewing needle at a loose tail of red thread sticking up beside his cross-stitch heart, his mouth a small surprised "oh".

The Snag Nab-It is a short metal needle with no eye, pointed at one end and rough like a nail file along the other. Push it through the front beside the stray tail and the tail goes to the back with it. The same move drags the fuzz out of an unpicked patch.

For the cross-stitcher who's never heard of it, and plenty haven't, because it's sold as a sweater-snag repair tool. One stitcher went nearly forty years at the hoop without knowing it existed. It fixes the sweater too, and the sofa the cat got at.

It's small enough to lose, so it lives on its card or on the needle minder, the magnet that parks needles on the fabric. For fine fabric there's a knotted-needle version too.

The one to buy blind

The neck light is the one to buy when you don't know what they do on the sofa. For everyone else, pick the entry for their craft and order the thing it names.