Ipad Mini travel cover

A friend of mine was lucky enough to receive an iPad Mini for Christmas and what a delightful thing it is! It is useful in a zillion and one ways already, so it's only natural that my friend wants to look after it like a baby! It already has a purple case which is brilliant for around the house but it needed a little pouch to protect it when it's being transported outside the house! Am not sure I'd want to just chuck it in the bottom of a bag either!

We decided that we wanted to make a padded pouch in two colours: pink and white spots for the outside, and solid pink for the inside. It's always more of an achievement to tackle a one off project like this, without using an actual pattern! As we didn't think the project would take that long (famous last words!) we didn't start the project til later on in the afternoon. Luckily, we'd had a full roast dinner in our belly's to sustain us for a few hours and we still had Christmas pudding to look forward to at the end of our creating!

Now, it would have been all to easy to make two rectangular sandwiches of material with wadding in between, stitch around the outside, turn the right way around; then to simply top stitch the two finished rectangles together - hey presto! But no, we didn't take the easy route! We wanted a case that looked as good on the inside as it does on the outside. We didn't want any seams to be visible. We also wanted to make the front different in some way, so it stood out from the mass produced carry pouches you can buy. So with absolutely no idea of how we were gonna achieve any of this, we set off for the 'Sewing Room' upstairs in my house!

3hrs later we came back down the stairs with this! It is really scrummy - we love it!
 

Things we learnt?

Well, firstly, it is almost impossible to pin Velcro into position. So the way we got round that was to place the Velcro where you want it to be, then draw around the Velcro with the erasable pen (e.g. Frixion pen). This then gives you the exact placement of the Velcro and therefore, acts as a visual guide to ensure you sew it in the right position every time!

When working with material with spots on, make sure that when you're drawing a straight line, that you make sure you are drawing along the same bit of the line of spots! It really does make a difference to the finished appearance.

As for the contrast material triangle at the bottom of the front cover? The idea came from a technique that I watched Kirstie Allsopp use in one of her TV programmes called Vintage Home, when she made a quilted Christmas stocking. Basically, we placed the plain pink material over the corner (right sides together) and stitched in a straight line on the diagonal (taking care to ensure it's on the same line of spots!). Then you simply pull the material back on itself, and hey presto, a perfectly seamed corner piece! As the solid pink material is quite thin, we needed the two layers so that you wouldn't be able to see the spots through it in the finished article....genius!

The hardest part was figuring how to achieve the 'no seams' look that we wanted. Had the pouch not had a flap that flips over, it would have been a lot simpler. But a flap we had, so a flap we had to deal with! In the end the way we did it, we sewed the side edges of the flap together first, leaving the top edge open. This would be where we turn the finished project through at the final stage. The flap was then pinned out of the way, so we didn't accidentally sew through it when we sewed the rest of the seams around the outside (been there, done that!).