Old Quilts/New Cover

     I saved enough points on my charge card purchases to get an iPad Air. I've never had a tablet before so this is quite a new toy for me. As a matter of fact, when I saw the microphone symbol on the keyboard, I thought "No way".  I pressed the microphone symbol and began to talk and my words appeared on the screen! For many of you, this is old hat, but for me, the Neanderthal, it freaked me out.
     Anyway, it required a quilted case, of course. I visited Lyric Kinard's blogpost Here and got the idea to make my case using her method as a base for my fabric. So I dug into the shoebox where I keep scraps of strips that I've cut off of quilts that I've squared off and small quilts that just didn't work out. Then I browsed the Internet for a tutorial on iPad covers and found This marvelous tutorial.
     I chose quilted pieces I had that went together well. Some already had rocks sewn onto them. Yay! To make the appropriate sized pieces for my iPad cover as called for in the tutorial, I sewed quilted pieces together with a utility stitch on my machine by butting up the edges of the fabrics and just sewing them together. (My pieces already were quilted with a top fabric and batting but no backing fabric.) It was a stitch that looks like it was serged.

Piece of old quilts sliced and sewn together

     Once I had all the pieces called for in the tutorial, I embellished them with machine embroidery and added some more rocks by machine appliquéing them on. Then I just followed the tutorial. At first read, it seemed to me like it was going to be complicated, but it was actually very straight forward.

Front of cover with fold-over flap

 I put my fold-over flap more over to the side rather than in the center so that it wouldn't hide the rocks. (So vain of me.) That turned out to not be such a good idea because the iPad isn't protected enough that way. So the next evening, I made another fold-over flap and sewed it on to the first on extending it so that the iPad is protected properly.

Back of cover

There is enough space inside the cover to put a little pouch that holds the iPad power cord and a cloth to clean the iPad, too.
I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can visit other art quilt blogs. Please make comments to let the artists know you stopped by.

Going Green

I was surfing the Internet and found two sites about making memo pads from envelopes and scrap paper. I modified the directions from both of them to make memo pads from envelopes that I get in the mail. I used the outer envelopes from bills that I get and from the envelopes enclosed in mail that I don't use. I even used envelopes that had transparent, plastic windows and envelopes that had a lot of writing on them. The security envelopes have designs in them that are like decorative papers. Some of the envelopes even have pictures on them. I figure I can write around the pictures and the text that is already on them. Here are the 2 sites: using scrap paper for memo pad  and craftingagreenworld.com . I'll be checking these sites in the future for other DIY green crafts. Since I'm all about fabric, I used scrap pieces of fabric to cover my memo pads. Here are some photos of the steps I took and the final products.

Finished memo pads with Marsha Derse fabrics glued to them
to make front and back covers. The fabric is glued
the whole way around so that it covers the folded
edges, too. I used Mod Podge as the glue.

I sliced 3 sides off of each envelope leaving
each envelope about 3 inches wide. I then folded the cut
envelopes in half. The patterned white  thing
you see at the bottom is part of a shelf liner, I use
it to keep the paper and ruler from sliding around.

Here are 3 of pads with their folded sides
glued to each other. The clips are holding the
folded envelopes together until
they dry.

flipping through to show you a page that
has patterns and a window.

Flipping through to show you pages that
have text.

Flipping through to show you pages that have cute
pictures and a window.