Friday, March 9, 2012

Making a book to contain my computer which is full of books

Ben made this amazing cover out of a book for his Kindle and I asked him to do a guest post to share how he made it. 

My wonderful wife got me a Kindle for Christmas a year and a bit ago, and I love it. I use it every day and it is full of books. I wanted to make a case for it and saw some cool projects online, so I took a bit from here and a bit from there, added some ideas of my own, and ended up with this.

First, materials. I found a book for $1 on the outside racks at the Strand. I loved it. An old ex-library, hardcover YA sci-fi adventure from the 1950s with a beautiful cover, and just the right size. (I have since researched the book and discovered it was written under a pseudonym by Isaac Asimov, an unexpected bonus bit of cool context.) For the inside I looked around a bit and eventually found some great fabric at Purl. It has trees and turtles and hedgehogs and squirrels. I like these things.



Next, I eviscerated the book. That was hard to make myself do, and took a lot of psyching up, but once I began it took all of 15 seconds.

I then cut some cardboard to fit just inside the front and back covers as well as the spine. I cut the fabric to cover the cardboard in two pieces, one containing the front cover and spine, the other for the back cover. For the front cover, I wanted to include a pocket to hold a small notebook, so I cut a square of fabric and sewed that to the fabric for the front piece. I then sewed the front and back pieces of fabric to their respective pieces of cardboard.


I used hot glue to attach the front piece to the inside of the book. I cut four segments of elastic fabric to use to hold the book in place, and glued them around the corners of the back piece of fabric-covered cardboard. Finally I glued this piece onto the back cover of the book, overlapping the fabric from the front.

I was very happy with the finished product, except that the elastic was not quite tight enough to hold the kindle firmly in place. This turned out fine, however, as I need a place for a pen. I found a pen at Muji that fit perfectly in this space and provided the necessary snugness to keep the kindle from escaping without my consent. The end!

5 comments:

  1. This is so incredibly sweet and cool! What a fabulous idea...I want one! I'm planning to get a Kindle when we move to Germany to be able to get English language books, so maybe I can convince Ben to make me one?! If I say it's for Eloise?!

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  2. Indeed. Eloise is eligible to receive one, if I can also send books to fill up the Kindle for her. I read one today that I want to read to her... I may make recordings, but I don't know if I can wait until she is old enough to appreciate them for feedback.

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  3. WOAH!!! That's so so cool! I'm so impressed. I want to make something crafty now. But instead I will go write a brief since I just spent the past two hours of my life writing a brief for the wrong case. You guys have awesome lives. Which makes sense because you are awesome people.

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  4. I know, Ben did such a good job with this cover. You are so crafty too, we should do some crafts together.

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