Home-Made E-Reader Case
I was recently given a second-hand ereader/mini-tablet (the plan being to buy ebooks instead of trade paperbacks, and thus to prevent bookquakes in the study), but when I decided I’d better get a case for it, to prevent it being damaged by all the things I lug around in my briefcase when I travel — books to read, books to read from, notebook in case I think of something to write down — I discovered that for my budget, cases are rather on the expensive side. Forty dollars for two pieces of cardboard and some vinyl? I could buy a book for that. Or even two or three. And they don’t look all that sturdy, really. There are lots of patterns for knitting or crocheting an ereader case, but there’s not any more protection there than in a tea-cosy.
Cardboard, I decided, I could manage. But old corrugated cardboard on its own didn’t seem good enough. Women of a certain age apparently get … urges.
They start to … make things.
Out of felt. And “fun foam.”
Glue guns are involved.
ARGH! It can’t be happening to me! I’m too young!
However, my ereader was living in a bubble-envelope, in constant danger of being mistaken for something more sturdy and not made of glass and electronics, so action had to be taken, preferably before I set off for my next series of school readings.
But as it turned out, I couldn’t make the glue gun I borrowed dribble out more than a tiny bead of glue, which promptly solidified into a hard cold lump and had to be scraped off my cardboard. I’m safe from the regression-to-kindergarten cut-and-paste craft urges for a while yet.
Despite this, I did make a fairly sturdy ereader case out of corrugated cardboard, a piece of “fun foam” (red in the photos), a piece of felt (blue), some strong white glue (for laminating it all), and lots of duct tape.
Lots and lots of duct tape.
“And you think they’re going to let you on an airplane with that?” asked the Spouse. “It looks like a bomb.”
Oh.
In which cartoon?
But on reflection, though it may not look like a bomb, the sort of paranoid security that once told me my ballpoint pen “looked very suspicious” while clicking it repeatedly (to see if it would explode?) and which dropped my netbook on the floor — it survived, no thanks to them, and I held up their line while I booted it all up again to make sure of that — is likely to dissect my laminated case in order to make sure I’m not smuggling ze microfeelm. Which you couldn’t do in a vinyl and cardboard boughten case, oh no.
So, for situations where the Kobo has to look respectable, I think I’ll try this double-layered crocheted pattern from Ravelry, which at least has decent padding. I could add a thin sheet of hard cardboard between layers to protect the screen, too.
No duct tape involved.
