I Pad Cover

Make an Ipad Cover without a pattern

I had some fabric that I bought in mandors from their offcuts that they often have on sale beside the till.The decission then was what to make with it and as it was coming up to Christmas I decided to make my mum and Ipad cover as the one she had was a bit chewed by the dog. I thought it was a really fitting fabric as it had lots of magazine covers on it, so more fitting for an ipad cover than a piece of clothing, which is what I usually make.

I searched the internet for ideas and patterns but in the end I measured and cut the fabric to my own sizes. It's a first generation Ipad I was making it for and a lot of the patterns out there are for the more recent ones and the ipad mini. I got the dimensions for it from this website and set about working out my sizes.

With the Ipad sizes of 9.56 x 7.47 x 0.5inches, I converted it into metric sizes (I work in metric on a daily basis and just find myself getting confused if I go between the two) so this gave me dimensions on 243 x 190 x 13mm for the Ipad. I decided to make an envelope style cover and worked out I needed the following;

• Fabric - approx 600mm x 550mm
• wadding to pad the cover out 
• 250x192mm card to provide a structured back 
• ribbon 
• a button

This sketch shows my thinking behind what material I would need to cut. There were two lengths of 260x516mm to be stitched together and filled with wadding and card. These would then be sewn at set distance to create the folds to give the envelope effect.
The small squares of fabric would be folded into triangles and sewn onto the right side of the fabric to create holds for the ipad.


So my first step was the triangles. I took the square and folded them into triangles, turning down the seams and pinned them to the right side of the fabric. I allowed for a 3cm seam to the inside at either side of the length of the fabric and then came in by a further 2cm from the edge before stitching. I placed them 250cm apart. This allowed enough space between them to fit the ipad, but for them not to be too tight that it was a squeeze to get the ipad in.

Once this was done I put the two lengths of fabric facing sides together and sewed them along the width and up the length of the fabric (keeping it open at the top). I then turned the fabric right side round giving me a pocket to stuff with wadding etc. I put the card inside at the base to the side of fabric which had the triangular supports and a length of wadding, slightly larger than the card behind it. I then sewed a straight line using a zig zag stitch 210mm from the bottom to close this pocket over. 

I placed more wadding above this line between the two lengths of fabric, roughly the same size as the previous piece and once again used a zig zag stitch to sew a line 210mm above the previous stitch. At this point you have a back to insert your ipad into and piece of fabric large enough to cover the front of it, leaving the flap of the envelope the only incomplete piece.

For this I created a seam by turning the edges of the fabric in on both lengths of fabric and sewing them together. Again I used teh zig zag stitch for this. I used this stitch as I thought the zig zag black fabric against the red and grey fabric gave it a nice contemporary edge.

The finishing touch was the ribbon and button. For this I had to borrow my mums ipad to check where was the optimum position for the button and ribbon to make sure the cover felt secure when closed. I put a pin in the location of the button and hand stitched it on. I made a loop out of the ribbon to be hooked round the button as a closer - because it's easier than a button hole and I thought it'd look nice. The end of the ribbon were sewn using the zig zag stitch to the underside of the flap to give a nice clean finish on the outside of the cover.

I hope my instructions were in some way easy to follow - I did this without a pattern and so there was some measuring things along the way but it was fairly simple to do and the same principles could be applied to a cover for any tablet device. One thing I would do differently if doing it again would be to sew the triangular supports onto the central panel, not the end, and have the card in here. That would mean your ipad would be in the middle and the left and right sides would fold on top of it to cover it.

Any questions or comments feel free to post away :)