What is a quick gift.

Bookbinding is really quick, easy, and cheap (especially if you get creative with what you use as an awl). Planning on making my dad a couple of pocket notebooks tomorrow. I've also made my dad a double knit piano bookmark out of fingering weight yarn in under a couple hours. Last Christmas I was able to knit my grandpa a hat out of aran weight baby alpaca in an evening (only did a couple inches of ribbing so it went really quick). Seems like old people would like homemade cookies or candy, too! My grandpa wasn't very into desserts but he loved my peanut butter cookies. You can put food-stuff in a tin you decorated yourself to make something that can be kept forever. I'm really bad at gifts for men, though, so maybe these aren't the greatest ideas, haha.

I like knitting but alot of the time only have the patience to knit a simple scarf which can take me an evening or two to knit x

a hat?

I know I'm super late on this one, but I constantly find myself in this dilemma as well. Maybe other people do as well. I make people friendship bracelets when I've gotta do something fast, keychains, shrinky dink jewlery (non of which are really grandpa appropriate though) But I found what usually goes over the best is a personalized version of something they already have...Like if he has a can, find another one and engrave it or something, that way you know they either need it or already like if but if you can put a fancy homemade spin on something they already have and like its usually a safe bet.

Or you can always fix something they need to have fixed, if you like me people keep give me shtuff to fix and it sits in piles forever so for birthday I give them all their stuff back fixed. It's lame but they'll totally appreciate it later.