We are making these felt covers with our Brownie Girl Scouts so bear with me. I need to post the instructions here for a few of the girls who missed the first meeting and want to catch up. The girls were able to choose a template for an iPad, iPad mini, eReader (such as Nook or Kindle), or an eye-glasses (iGlasses?!) case.
Supplies:
- Cardboard Template
- Embroidery Needle
- Embroider Thread
- Button
- Felt
- Sewing pins
- Fabric scissors
- Sharpie
First, trace the template of your main cover piece twice and the “envelope flap” once and cut out.
Take your two body pieces and stack them together. Move one down about 1/2 an inch and make a straight line with a sharpie on the piece underneath. It will look like this. Cut along that strip.
Stack the pieces again with the shorter one on top. The overhang of the bottom piece should be at the top of your cover. Stack the envelope flap on top of the main pieces. It should cover where the two are uneven. Flip it up and mark a spot with a sharpie of where a button should be – you’re creating an button-able envelope. Make sure you’re marking the shorter piece as that will be the front of the tech cover.
Sew your button on the shorter piece where you marked it with a sharpie.
My first template for the envelope flap was a triangle. I found it didn’t work as well as making a squared off top for my flap. Here’s the difference.
Once you have your button sewn on, restack the front and back of the tech cover and place the envelope flap at the top on the front piece. Pin all three pieces together with sewing pins.
To sew the case together, start at the top left corner of the flap. I single-threaded my needle and showed the girls how to hold the needle and thread together when pulling each stitch through so they didn’t unthread their needle each time. Make sure you start by pulling your needle through from the back of the flap so your knot ends up on the back of the fabric…. you’ll want to make sure to do it this way each time you restart your thread.
When I started my piece AND when I had to rethread, I always went back through the hole I had just sewn through to get my blanket stitch started.
If you don’t go back through your hole, your pattern will start like this…
If you do go back through your hole, it will look like this…
It’s really just a preference thing.
You’re going to do a blanket stitch all the way around the bottom of the envelope flap (starting in that upper lefthand corner, working your way down and around and back up to the righthand corner. To do a blanket stitch, come up through your fabric… your needle will be on the front-side of the fabric. Take it around to the backside and bring it up through about a fingernails’ width from your first stitch.
Before you pull the thread tight, there will be a little loop… slip your needle through that loop catching your thread in your stitch…
Pull it tight and repeat the pattern. Don’t pull too tight or you’ll pucker your fabric.
When you complete the bottom of your flap, you will now pierce through all three pieces of felt working your way across the top of the tech cover back toward the left (where you started on your flap… when you get to the upper lefthand corner, work your blanket stitch down the left side of the tech cover, across the bottom and back up the right side. You’ve now completed the stitching all the way around and in the process sewn your tech cover together.
When you run out of thread, you will need to rethread your needle and start your stitching where you left off. After tying off my lose thread (on the back of the piece) I lift my pieces apart to start my new stitch so my new knot falls on the inside. You can put your needle through the same hole as your last stitch if you want and then grab the thread from your last stitch to continue the decorative stitch.
(knot falling in between the pieces…)
(thread through the same hole…)
(grabbing the thread from the last stitch…)
The last thing you’re going to do is bring your flap down over the button, pinch the fabric over the button, and snip the tiniest button hole on the envelope flap. You can make it bigger if you need to, but start small! Widen it as necessary until you can button your flap.
You now have a felt cover for your tech gear…
Leader/Teacher tips:
- We worked each step as a group. The embroidery thread is thick and hard to get through the eye of the needle. Make sure you use large embroidery needles for this job.
- We double knotted the end of our thread so the knot wouldn’t slip through the weave of the felt.
- Some of our girls were faster than others, simply because they’ve sewn a button and hand-stitched before. Because we were doing each step together, I tasked the experienced girls with helping the inexperienced girls thread needles, knot thread, and supervise sewing on buttons. This helped a lot!
- Be patient!! It took us an entire meeting to trace our templates, cut them out, line up our buttons… and get the buttons sewn on. In fact, some of the girls took their buttons home to sew on. It took us another meeting to pin the pieces together and start working on our blanket stitch. I suggest at least 3 meetings for Brownies to complete this project. For us, it was a great way to finish out a year filled with working through almost all the badges that came in the Brownie starter kit notebook.
