Lately, I’ve been getting back into music and reading. I love the freedom this gives me. I did not realise entirely how much time I was spending on social media and reading online articles in general. Distancing myself from those and focusing on pastimes that require more patience have helped me find some inner peace.
When I got a bonus from work in January, I bought a new digital audio player. My old one, a Cowon D2, was from 2008. It had 8 GB of internal memory, which was a lot back then, but in 2020 it’s not that much anymore. Time to upgrade! I love Cowon products, so I looked at their current offerings. A new player had just been released: the Cowon Plenue R2. A modern digital audio player with bluetooth, 128 GB of internal memory, and excellent sound quality.
I was super happy with my new player, and I looked around to see if I could find a good case for it. Unfortunately, there is only one case available online, and it doesn’t cover the screen. So I decided to make something myself. I didn’t have a pattern, I just improvised.
I looked through my fabric stash and found some nice musical fabric. Music notes and clefs for the outside and songbirds for the inside. I wanted the case to have two compartments: one for the player and one for the IEMs and cable. So I decided to try and have a divider in the middle of a standard bag.
This was my first project with my Janome 4300 QDC and I was excited to see what the machine can do. And I can tell you that the limitations are solely between machine and chair. The sewing machine easily punches through several layers of fabric and foam.
I put interfacing on both fabrics and added a foam layer as well to make sure that the player is well-protected. Then I started sewing everything together. I put the divider in the inside bag. And then I ran into a problem. How to stitch everything together with a zipper in between, while there is a divider in the inside bag? Normally I would put the inside and outside bag inside each other in reverse, keep a hole while sewing them together, and pull the bag through the hole and sew it shut. That didn’t work now.
So I decided to try and sew the zipper in from the right side. Uh oh, another problem. The pouch was too small and I had to maneuver quite a bit to get it under the sewing foot. I couldn’t go all the around either because the zipper foot was in the way. I tried a couple of times, but it just became more and more messy. So I decided to hand sew the zipper in.
It took me a while, but hand sewing it together was easier than using the machine in this instance. And yes, the finishing is crude, also because of the earlier attempts with the machine, but I still like the resulting pouch.
I used a bit of ribbon to attach D rings so that I can use it as a purse if I like, or attach a wrist strap. I did leave the zipper ends as they are. The divider works well.
The digital audio player and its accessories fit in the pouch nicely!
The stitching around the zipper is not great, but hey, the zipper works and the zipper foot doesn’t fall off!
I guess that I need to finish the zipper ends properly. I might do that with some of the songbird fabric. But I was too tired today to immediately pick that up.
Check out my messy stitching! Perhaps I can embroider it someday to hide it, haha!
I’m quite happy with the pouch. The finished dimensions are around 12 cm x 4 cm x 8 cm. I’ll bring it with me in the train to work tomorrow to try it out!
