I hope I won't insult anyone when I say I have never quite seen the point of knitted phone or tablet or laptop covers. Maybe a knitted cover would provide a little cushioning and a dose of cuteness, but it would seem to me to be quite impractical: having to take the cover off the phone or tablet to use it, and if you drop the device-- well, not much protection there.
Well, a couple of months ago I saw an iPhone cover that looked like the Tardis, probably in a blog post photo from The Bloggess. (This may seem like a digression, but it is a very short one.) And since I am a Dr. Who fan, I immediately Googled "Tardis iPhone cover' to see where I could get one. That is how I found Redbubble. And yes, Redbubble has several cool Tardis iPhone covers, but as I looked around the site, I realized that the point of the site is that artists and designers can use their art to create their own items--prints and clothing as well as iPhone and iPad cases.
And that is how I got the idea of creating cases that looked like knitting, but were actually made of hard plastic-- decorative AND functional. I searched the site and was surprised to find only a few "knitted" cases, so I added a few of my own, then ordered a couple of them to see how they looked in person.
I waited to write this post until I received the cases, and I was quite impressed with their quality: the images are very clear, and the iPhone case works well- I've been using it for over a month now. (The iPad case doesn't fit my iPad--whoops! It is for an iPad 2, and I have the relatively ancient iPad 1. Anyone need an iPad 2 case?) I have one minor criticism: the finish is glossy. After I received the cases, I searched for a matte finish custom case, and found one at Zazzle, but the image quality is really inferior to the Redbubble version (I will post comparison photos soon).
So if you want to create your own cool "knitted" iPhone or iPad cases, I recommend Redbubble-- or you can buy one of my designs! I will say that it took a fair amount of work to line the photos of knitting up with the cover templates, so that the various ports and cutouts fit nicely with elements of the knitted stitch patterns. In fact I took a bunch of new photos because I felt the ones I already had weren't high res enough, or weren't lighted ideally to create the effect of knitted fabric. And I have to replace the photo for the Dragon Skin iPad case, because I realized that there is a mistake in the stitch pattern (which I never noticed before!); if you look at the 2nd photo, it is visible as a jog in the edges of the "scales," almost exactly halfway down.
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