I love working with pretty yarn and I love knitting and crochet but not everyone has those skills so I sometimes hesitate posting tutorials that need those skills here… but I still love working with yarn so I try to do other techniques that use it. Things like the heart and strawberry shaped pompoms, no knit yarn strawberries etc are really fun to do and don’t take much skill at all 😀
With that in mind today I’ll show you how I made a simple woven slip cover for my ipad. You could use this same technique for a laptop, phone or anything really!
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What you need:
I wanted to get this done quite quickly so I decided to use this really thick squishy yarn, it’s super soft and kind of looks like a big rainbow pipe cleaner. If you use thin yarn it will take longer to put it all together and weave tight enough to avoid holes. Whatever you use the technique is the same.
So grab one end of the yarn and tie it around the ipad/laptop. Knot it in place so it doesn’t move. Don’t do this too tightly because you want the gadget to be able to slide in and out of the case easily.
Next keep wrapping the yarn around in a big spiral so it forms several straight lines across the ipad. Tie the last loop to itself so the whole thing doesn’t come undone.
Now the case I made has a fancy end part which is woven in a different direction to the bottom, if you want to do that then you can cut the extra yarn off but if you want to have the whole thing woven in the same direction leave it attached. The reason for this is that when you weave it all together it will compact and it won’t be long enough to encase the whole ipad anymore so it’s easier to just work with it in two sections.
Next it’s time to measure out the cross pieces, if you’re doing the fancy end weaving you want them to be around 3-4 times as long as the gadget so there is lots of room for mistakes. If you just want it to do regular weaving then 3 times as long should be fine. Folded in half mine was this long:
Cut a *heap* of them. I needed about 3 times as many as shown here to do the whole case. In fact I used a whole ball of yarn for this project.
So let’s get to the actual weaving part. Take one of your lengths of yarn and start weaving it horizontally across under, over, under, over, under, over etc until you reach the other side.
Do the same with another piece but if you started by going under, this time start by going over. It should be the opposite to the pattern you did with the first yarn.
Close up you can see what I mean.
At the end, take the two pieces of yarn and wrap them over the end of the gadget.
… and continue the weaving pattern over the back. if you ended on an “over” on the front then make sure to start on an “under” on the back to keep the pattern going. Also make sure the loose ends on the yarn are roughly the same length so we can use them later.
Now go crazy with the weaving! I did about half of them on one side working form the middle to the edge then flipped it and continued them on the back.
At around this point its a good idea to add a couple of cross yarn lengths to the bottom so it strengthens it a bit more.
All I did was cut 2 more lengths of yarn and just weave them into the bottom from left to right.
I knotted them and left the ends loose so I could knot them with the yarn on the sides to form more sturdy corners.
The sides need to have a nice tight weave to protect the ipad/laptop/whatever from damage so when you get to that point make sure the yarn is very close together.
In the photo below you can still see gaps so it’s best to add another strand or two just to be on the safe side!
Repeat the process until the whole thing is covered nice and tightly. You can see that by pushing the strands together tightly to form the fabric the whole thing has shrunk leaving around 1/3rd of the ipad exposed. At this point if you want to keep the straight weave all you need to do is move the case a little further down the gadget so you have room to wrap around another lot of vertical strings to weave the ends in to. Keep going in this way until it’s as long as you want 😀
I decided I wanted something a little more decorative at the ends so what I did was tie each pair of end strings into a knot. Then from each pair I pointed one diagonally right and one diagonally left. Having them all pointed at an angle like than made it very easy to weave them together. Same concept as before: over/under/over/under etc but on an angle.
I kept doing it around the edge, slowly getting them all into place. Once it was long enough I broke them into pairs again and double knotted all of the ends together to prevent it from just coming undone.
At that point it looked like this… I trimmed all the ends down so they were even but I left them around 5cm long to make a kind of frill at the end. Lastly I just pushed the couple of loose ends from the bottom corners in.
All finished!
And that it, the techniques can seem a bit complicated at first but once you get the basic idea down you can make pretty much anything. The fact that you’re actually weaving onto your ipad/laptop/whatever means you know it’s going to be a perfect fit every time. Easy! ^_^ |
