Leather Kindle Cover

Something outside of paper today, a case for my kindle!

Working with leather at school has its upsides, especially when I get free time to do some personal projects. So I started with a pieces of leather (probably about 14" x 8", but I cut it down from that so it's not very important). I originally picked up a pack of leather remnants from hobby lobby for a different project but it had a lot of good, large pieces in it so it was really worth the $9 compared to leather shop prices.

Price breakdown: (technically free because all things were purchased for a different project, but here goes anyway)

• $5.40 leather*
• $1.50 elastic chord*
• the thread was actually free, it's been a fixture in my mom's sewing stuff for years
• $4.99 string of beads

      *The elastic chord was on sale from $3, and I used a hobby lobby 40% coupon for the $9 leather.

     

      = $11.89 (it's worth mentioning I think this is the 4th thing I've made out of all these items)

I made a paper rectangle the size of my kindle (4 5/8" x 6 5/8") and used that to cut out the leather. That being said, it's a very tight squeeze and even though I left some wiggle room it was not quite enough. I used a heat gun and warmed it up to stretch it a little and that helped a lot.

I trimmed the leather to 7 1/2" x 12 1/2", I folded the short side over the paper rectangle and stitched the two lines about 7" apart. Next time they would be about 7 1/4" apart. I hand sewed the elastic and the beads (and extra reinforcement on the top of the machine stitches. I waited until I was finished sewing to trim down the sides. That's how to get stitches so close to the edge on leather very easily.