Saturday was a day of oops for me. I made this great mix of music for walking, in the range of 120-130 BPM so I can keep a good pace. I went for a walk with my huz and we were walking at a good clip and suddenly my iPod starts stuttering and gets stuck. I tried to turn it off, but no go. Then suddenly it worked again, about an hour later! As I am walking back to the car, I feel it starting to drop, and discover this. The strap had become unstitched from the case I was using. I’m glad I felt it dropping, or I would have been really bummed!
So when I got home, I started looking on line for a new case, maybe a sturdier one or an armband one. But my iPod is a Gen 3, so it’s pretty heavy and old, so there aren’t many choices left out there. I think it might be too heavy for an arm band. So I decided to knit one for myself. I cast on, and after a while I decided I didn’t like what I started with, and went to pull the needle out so I could frog and look what happened! This is a KnitPicks Options needle and the cable came right out of the coupling. I am going to email them and see if they will replace it, since I’ve only had it for a month. Luckily, I could switch out the other cable and so I was able to continue.
So here’s what I came up with. It started with about a mile of I-cord, which I then used to pick up stitches and knit the body in the round while the I-cord wraps around the whole thing. I picked up a stitch of I-cord in each of the four “corners” of the bag and knit it together (k2tog or ssk, as appropriate) until the bag was long enough to hold my iPod. No, I didn’t knit all that I-cord myself. I used my handy-dandy Embellish-Knit! which works great with yarns DK or smaller. Once you read the directions. ;/
When it was all done, I thought it was too loosey-goosey, so before binding off, I got my handy seed stitcher tool (for machine knitters) and dropped whole columns of stitches, changing it to a mostly k2p2 rib all around. I tried it on again and liked it much better. I bound off one side and began knitting the flap back and forth, with an I-cord edging on each side. The flap was a little narrow, so I cast on 5 stitches in the middle of the row, creating a hole that my remote cord or headphones would fit through.
I toyed with double knitting the pocket on the flap, but decided that I didn’t want to try doing that for the first time with a single, solid color yarn. It would be too easy to mess it up. Instead, I knitted down the flap, decreased a few stitches to give it a little curve, then did a row of purls as a turning ridge. Then I knitted the pocket side of the flap, with an inch of k1p1 ribbing at the last inch, and bound off.
The I-cord edging on the flap had a nice 2 st purl dip which was perfect for sewing up the edges of the pocket to the flap, which were the only seams for the whole thing! I wove in my ends, and here is the result. What do you think? I made it long enough to fit over my neck and under my arm so it will be out of the way when walking. Since it’s knit, it will have a little stretch to it and the weight of the iPod will hold it down while I walk. When it’s not being used, the pocket will hold the remote and headphones. When it’s being used, the pocket could hold my car key.
It’s knit with under one skein of Louet Sales Opal Gems Merino on a size 3.5mm needle. Took about 4 hours to knit, frog, knit some more, frog some more, and finally finish.