Hello everyone! I am due for a progress post this week, so here’s the scoop on what I have been working on:
My sister recently bought a really nice Nook reader, and was planning on buying a case for it (do you know how much those things cost? Geez!) but I told her I could make one. So I been working on designing and knitting the case, and finding different ways learn new knitting techniques in the process. If my sister loves it (yes, the critera is love) I will be adding it to my list of things available in my up-and-coming etsy shop. I thought I’d give you a sneak peak on the process, and then introduce some sources that I thought really helped me out.
I don’t have a Nook Simple Touch. (I still read paper books…did you read my post on my reading goals for this summer?)
So I had to improvise. Google told me that a Nook Simple Touch was 6.5″ x 5″, so I found a really nice image of one and copied it to my Word processor. I resized the image there, and then used a wash out “artist effect” from the picture manager panel to reduce the amount of ink it would take the print the image out. Then I tore the back off of a standard-size pad of graph paper to use as the board backing to my image.
I could pass it off as real if it had a back light, :)
The fake Nook was my first step. I would recommend making a model out of anything you plan to make a case for, just so that your design will have a standard shape and size every time. This also works to reduce having to find the item in question when you need to size the case, or making the case too big due to human error.
The second thing I had to do was to decide what material was good enough to use as a case. Most fibers that are really soft can get matted after being shoved in a backpack for too long, or get worn along the seams of the case. I’ve also noticed that pure arylic yarns (the cheap ones, anyways) are useless at protecting something that shouldn’t get scratched. So I decided on a new yarn by Lion Brand called “Cotton Ease”, which you probably have heard of if you read my post about the shawl I am working on (that is currently in hiatus). It’s a blend on cotton and arylic that is not only nice to work with, it’s easy on delicate things. And fully machine washable! I consider that a plus.
So I’ve gotten the basics down.
There were other criteria decided for this project as well: I wanted to use two colors, Turquoise and Charcoal (the two colors I had in my stash), and I wanted to make the case thicker than a single fabric of knit. So I decided to use the knitting technique called “double knitting“. Not a hard technique, but not one that I had done before. I want to keep the design a surprise, so I’ll stop there, but you can see some of my progress pictures.
Also below is a helpful tutorial about double knitting. The YouTube channel “VeryPink” is a high quality knitting technique-help show. Please note that while she does use a pattern to show double knitting, if you wanted to make a standard single color front-and-back fabric, you would just use the cast on row and repeat the first row over and over until you get the correct length.
Good luck, and leave me a comment!
green frog knits 