So I Don't Forget How I Made It!

This blog post is mainly for my benefit, I made something that I am ever so pleased with, and if I don't write it down I'll forget how I did it!  You might find it interesting too. 

You know my houses embroidery that I've prattled on about, well I finally finished it.  And this time I was determined to find a use for it, instead of yet another embroidery languishing in the drawer being useless.  My iPad cover is disintegrating so the lightbulb moment happened, and after much research and thinking and then doing, here it is, my new iPad cover!

 Here's the inside, isn't it pretty! 

 And here's what's going to stop the iPad from falling out, Velcro!

 It folds right back for easy use.

 I can prop it up both upright,

 and sideways.

 Now for the how I did it, so I don't forget. 
First I dismembered an unwanted hard covered book, using a scalpel I cut the pages away so just the cover was left.  Note to self, make sure the spine of the chosen book is at least 1cm tall so it sits properly over the iPad.

Next, I stitched some pretty hand dyed fabric around the embroidery so there was sufficient fabric to cover the front of the book.  Then I attached felt (with heavy duty Vliesofix) to the back of the fabric to pad it a little, just to the size of the book cover, but I also had a margin of unpadded fabric to fold over to the inside to glue.  Note to self, it was really hard to line up the embroidery on the front doing it this way, it would be easier to do the plain fabric cover first, then perhaps glue the embroidery to that.

Then came the covering of the hard book cover, after carefully lining everything up, I lay the embroidery/fabric cover down, right side down, then sat the open book cover on it, inside up. Then I painted fabric glue thoroughly onto the extra margin of fabric and wrapped it round and glued it to the inside edge of the book cover, using multifolds in the corners and tugging it firmly so it didn't have wrinkles.  A piece of protective plastic over it, then weighed the cover down to let the glue set firmly.

Then I cut a piece of different fabric, a nice stripey one, for the inside, about a centimetre smaller all round than the book cover itself (plus extra for seam)....this made it big enough to cover the rough edges of the front cover fabric that I'd just glued.  I stitched together the stripey fabric to a piece of iron on Vilene (right side of stripey fabric and non-iron side of Vilene together, around the edge with a small seam, rounding the corners, leaving a gap for pulling it inside out.  After pulling it inside out so the right side of the stripey fabric was on the outside, and the iron-on part of the Vilene was on the inside, and using a wooden skewer to poke out all the corners and edges neatly, I ironed it so I ended up with a neatly edged, thicker piece of fabric. 

I positioned the stripey piece on the inside of the cover where I wanted it to be, then started positioning where the iPad should sit.  I worked out where I wanted the Velcro to sit....I used 2 four inch pieces of Stitch and Stick Velcro, one an inch from the top of the iPad and one an inch from the bottom of the iPad.  After marking the iPad with pencil, I stuck down the Velcro on the iPad.  To line up the other side of the Velcro that I needed to stitch down on the stripey fabric, I velcroed the pieces together, then rubbed the backs with a bit of charcoal, then pressed that down on the fabric when positioning the iPad, that worked well, it gave me just enough of a mark on the stripey fabric to know where to sew the Velcro on, which is what I did next.

Then the stripey fabric had to be glued to the inside cover of the book.  I set it in position first, then carefully, so it didn't shift,  folded it back and glued the spine section first (using fabric glue), and gradually worked out from there, finishing with carefully gluing right to the edges with a bit of glue on a skewer.  After smoothing the fabric out carefully, I didn't want it to shift and thus wreck the position of the Velcro, I again covered it with a protective piece of plastic, then weighed it all down for the glue to set.

That's it!  I'm really happy with it, a unique and individual iPad cover.  The embroidery is a bit crooked, which I was momentarily unhappy about, but in actual fact I rather like it, it's a bit quirky!  And there is no problem with using Velcro, I was a bit worried it wouldn't be strong enough and envisioned the iPad sliding out of the cover and smashing, but I needn't have worried, it is very strong, quite hard to detach actually!  But I'll only need to do that to take the odd photo.  The only thing I need to start remembering is to press the top button of the iPad when I'm finished to turn off the screen, I'm used to my magnetic cover doing that automatically.

And if you are still reading, then I have to announce that the 42 crochet squares are complete!  Well, except where that white space is ha ha, I decided to replace one that has been bugging me, it's almost finished.

 The joining of the squares has begun!  I am joining with a slip stitch join and liking the look of it very much.  It is a little slow to do but worth it, it sits nice and flat.  It was suggested to do the join in the same colour as the outer row of the squares, which are all the same, but when I did a test join of the same colour, Parchment, then did another test join of my favourite colour, Sage, I liked it much better using Sage.  It gives all the squares another tiny border and I like that effect, I love stripes!

 This joining will keep me out of mischief for a while!