Pattern Review: iPad Quilted Cover from Patchwork, Please!

The quilting blogosphere and Flickr have been all abuzz about Ayumi Takahashi's newly released book, Patchwork, Please! Debbie from A Quilter's Table and Lindsay of LRStitched are hosting Zakka Along 2.0 where various bloggers will be sewing and posting their thoughts on each pattern in the book beginning on June 1. Not wanting to miss the party, I ordered the book shortly after it was released, and when my Mom asked for a cover for her iPad mini, I decided to modify the pattern in Ayumi's book and sew it up.

My first challenge was to modify the pattern to fit an iPad mini, as the pattern is written for a full sized iPad. The fact that my mother's iPad lives with her in a different city meant that I couldn't check sizing for accuracy as I went, so here's hoping that it fits! I'm okay at math, but whenever I start playing with patterns, I inevitably mess up. This experience was no different, I'm afraid.

Despite carefully writing out the dimensions of my fabric pieces, I still ended up changing them as I went. In part this is because I decided to make a patchwork cover and I miscalculated how many 2.5 squares I'd need. Luckily, adding a row on top and a row to the side provided a quick fix. By the way, like many of the projects in this book, this cover allowed me to dig into my scrap bin and pull out some fun prints, like the butterflies you see below!

 

Here are the dimensions of the cuts I ended up with, more or less. Please note, I can not vouch for accuracy so use these at at your own risk. For what it's worth, if I was to do it again, I think I'd add a half inch to each measurement.

Exterior/interior cover: 13 x 9.25 (edit: my version was 10.5 which was too tall!)

Closure flap: 3 x 5.5

iPad sleeve: 9.25 x 6.5

Pocket: 6.5 x 8.5

In terms of the actual pattern, I struggled with some of the instructions. I'm a visual learner and this pattern is all words, which is to be expected in a book I guess. My first issue arose at step seven, when I was instructed to bind the left long edge of the sleeve, which made no sense at all.

Wouldn't I bind the left edge last, when I bound the entire cover? And when would I bind the right edge, if not before attaching it to the exterior of the cover. I felt like this had to be an error in the pattern so I bound the right edge and proceeded.

My next challenge arose when I tried to understand how to construct the pocket. Admittedly, I didn't read the instructions closely enough the first time around. I made an adorable pocket which I mistakenly assumed I'd sew on to the cover. Wrong! So I sat down and read the instructions over (and over) again. Then I went to Flickr and read a discussion thread where Ayumi pointed out a typo in the pattern (alas, not the one I think I found in step seven) which contained PICTURES! Yay! I finally understood how to make the pocket.  Or so I thought...

Yup, I still managed to mess up. The instructions have you enclose the raw edges of the pocket in the binding of the cover. I missed this part (even though I read the instructions several times) and after completing all the edge and top stitching, couldn't figure out how to deal with the raw edges at the top of the pocket. So I bound them. Which looks silly because of the edge stitching. Alas. At this point I wasn't redoing the pocket a third time.

I didn't make the pocket flap with snaps. Instead I used velcro to secure the pocket and I'm happy with that decision. I ended up hand sewing the velcro to both the pocket and cover. Next time I'd machine stitch it before attaching the pocket to the cover because the hand sewing was fiddly.

Despite my challenges (and let me be clear: the pocket issue was mine all mine), I loved this pattern and I'm very happy with the end result. I'd definitely recommend it to others and would gladly make it again. In fact, I might just make one for my own iPad one of these days.

Edited on June 2: My Mom let me know that the cover was approximately an inch or 1.25 inches too long, so I've adjusted the measurements in this post to reflect this.