At our work Christmas drinks, I had a conversation with my very drunk friend about making a Polaroid case for her camera. I wanted to make is as a surprise because I thought she might not have remembered the conversation, but a) she did remember it and b) I had to ask her which model she had to know what size to make it. She has an sx70 which is 18cm x 10.5cm x 4cm. I added a cm to each edge for a seam allowance. I made the outside out of calico and the inside out of grey felt (both of which I had in my stash) and put 2 layers of wadding in between the 2 layers.

I decided to decorate the case with an old-fashioned drawing of an anatomical heart as my friend has been talking for a while of getting a tattoo of one – so I did this whole bit as a surprise! I picked this image:

I used the special paper that you can print on and then iron onto fabric:

Unfortunately, I’m an idiot and didn’t peel off the backing before I ironed the heart which I printed at work (because my printer is broken). This meant it was ruined…..and I was on a week off so I couldn’t just print another one. So after a long time of being full of rage at being so stupid, I had the brain wave to trace the heart onto the special paper by hand. I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out:

This is the inside:

The corners where a bit tricky, but I managed to make it all look okay. Plus this part stayed inside out, so it didn’t matter if the corners weren’t sharp when the right way around. I had to trim the seam allowances to get it small enough to get into the outside.

I hoped I would be able to sew the wadding into the seams, but my machine wouldn’t go through that many layers. So I sewed the wadding to the inner part:

I made the flap for closing the case separately, so I could then sew it into the seam between the inner and outer. I put the poppers on the grey side before I sewed it all together so you couldn’t see the stitching. They weren’t quite in a row, but I’m claiming that I did that on purpose so you’d know if was handmade!

I had to hand-sew the seam around the top of the case partly because I don’t think my machine would have sewed through 2 layers of felt, 2 layers of wadding and 2 layers of calico, but mainly because I couldn’t get it under the needle because the case is too small to fit. I forgot to take any photos of the top seam (which is a shame because I was pretty pleased with how neat it looked), so here is the finished case.

This is it with the camera inside – thank god it fit perfectly!

And again, but from the side:

This one is to absolutely prove it fits!

And a photo my friend took (she’s the photographer who is going to give me a lesson!)

Photo from here