One of the things I haven’t been able to get to lately is making a new phone cozy. As always happens with my sewn things (with anything cloth, I guess), it needs to be replaced about every 6 months. To its credit, I do take the phone in and out of it and take the whole shebang in and out of pockets and bags and backpacks seemingly a million times a day, so it’s not surprising to have to replace it that often.

Tonight I thought I could be clever and just snip away at the fraying outer layer, exposing the not-fraying-yet corduroy within, but I’d forgotten that I had a slight alignment issue when I sewed it all up and the corduroy wasn’t actually attached to one side. Oops. Into the cloth recycling bin with that!

Except now I needed a phone cozy, stat. Enter my old orange cashmere socks, most beloved of all socks. I wore them until the heel holes could be darned no more, and then cut off the tops for some other use before recycling the foot part. Lucky I did, because it’s the perfect size for an interim phone cozy:

Crappy picture, but you get the idea. I turned it inside-out, sewed up the bottom, turned it rightside-out, wove a short length of purple ribbon through the top, and there you have it. It’s not a permanent solution by any means, because glass on phone + fuzzy cashmere = slippery and I am too clumsy for that. But it’ll do until a few plates have slowed their rotation.

Here’s the outside view:

and the jaunty stripey inside view:

Like the last one, this cozy has a thicker inner lining (in this case, felt) with thin fabric on either side. I used ribbon for the edging again. It took forever to hand-stitch but I think it looks pretty nice this time. I used darker fabric and ribbon because lighter ones in the last version got dirty pretty quickly.

There are definitely a number of improvements in this iteration. For the last one I cut out 6 rectangles of fabric, layered them appropriately and machine-sewed on 3 sides. Then I couldn’t get the top ribbon edging to work because the external seams got in the way (and also had a frayable bottom seam to deal with).

For this one I cut 3 long rectangles of fabric and folded them before machine-sewing the sides (voila: no bottom seam). I stopped short of the very top, then hand-stitched the ribbon onto the top edges. Then I hand-stitched the ribbon on the sides; it’s mostly decorative, but also served to sew up either side at the top where I’d stopped short with the machine. I also remembered the old trick of halting a fraying edge of ribbon with a few drops of clear nail polish.

I can already see the improvements to the next version. All that hand-sewing is a drag — I have to figure out a way to machine-stitch the top edge ribbons on. They’re so slippery, though, that it’ll be rough going. I also need either thicker ribbon or to trim the fabric edges along the sides a little closer to the seam, because sometimes the seam stitches peek out from under the ribbon. And I need to figure out how to hand stitch the tops and bottoms of the side ribbons more neatly.

But all in all I think it’s a good effort. Go me! And now I have another useful skill, should I ever need it. Because in the 21st Century Great Depression *everyone* is going to need an iphone cozy!

1. Get some #6 plastic (which you should really be boycotting if you can, because it is evil and not recyclable while so many others are).

2. Decorate with sharpies. What, you don’t have many colors of sharpies? What’s wrong with you?

3. Cut out the designs.

4. Bake in a 250-degree toaster oven for about 30 seconds. Watch the magic happen through the window!

I’ll let you know when we try it. Stupid lettuce growers always use #6 in their packaging, bah.

(Yes, I had a Food Coop meeting tonight, can you tell?)