So for the last 3 years, I have made Christmas presents for my wonderful Aunt. She is a HUGE BBC Sherlock fan (along with quite a lot of other people I know!) so last year I made her a Benedict Cumberbatch Calendar:

(Photo from Evenlode’s Friend Tumblr)

It took AAAAGES to draw all of the line for all of the days inside!

 

 

I had to think of something to top it this year, so I decided to make her a Kindle case with a Sherlock theme. (A Kindle is approx 20.2cm high, 13.5 cm wide and 1cm thick, so I made the case 23cm x 16 cm with seam allowances. I figured it was thin enough to not need a gusset). Although I am contractually obliged to hate Kindles and Amazon, I had a brilliant idea of how I could make it awesome! On the internets, there is a LOT of fan art for Sherlock and amongst the common things are some Victorian-style silhouettes. I decided to cut these out of felt and applique them onto each side of the Kindle case:

It was quite fiddley, but worth it! I then used one of the fancy stitches around the outside, to give them, like, a frame. Look how they’re gazing at each other longingly!

So I was pretty pleased with this part, but the pièce de résistance was using some of John and Sherlock’s best-loved clothes (and the ones that so often appear in the many, many, many pieces of fan fiction) for the other side of the case – to make it reversible. Probably Sherlock’s most famous piece of clothing, aside from his amazing coat, is the purple shirt of sex:

I still had a bit of purple fabric left from making Norman (which is slightly wrong, using fabric bought for a child’s present to make a purple shirt of sex, but what are you gonna do?). I decided to cheat a bit and just sewed 2 lines down the middle of the rectangle but the buttons in the middle of them, to make it look like buttons and button holes. (There would be no point making functioning buttons and my machine is crap at button holes). You can just about make out the stitching…

Probably John’s most famous piece of clothing (aside from the red pants – warning, explicit content!) is his oatmeal/ biscuit coloured jumper he wears in the first episode:

For the other side of the purple shirt of sex, I knitted a rectangle of John’s jumper. I can’t quite remember how many stitches I cast on, though to work it out, knitting usually ends up about 1.5 times the width of the cast on stitches, not including the stitches which will be used in the cable. I practised to make sure I got all of the cables going the same way as on the actual jumper, though sadly, again, I can’t remember which way round it was – I have various notes which I worked from, but they don’t say which ones I used. Sorry!

Construction-wise, I sewed the 2 silhouettes and the shirt and jumper together as though they were small individual bags (with right sides together). I made a small button tab which was calico on one side and purple on the other side, so that it would blend in whichever way round you have the case – I sewed it together on 3 sides with right sides together (not that it really mattered as they’re pretty reversible fabrics) and turned it inside out – the un-sewn edge would get sewn into the top seam, so it didn’t matter that it wasn’t sewn. I also sewed a button-hole into the end of this (with purple thread in my bobbin and cream thread in my machine – check out the detail I went to!). The top button on the shirt allows the case to be closed up (and closed on the inside of the case if it’s the other way around).

I sewed the bottom seam allowances of both bags together a little bit, to stop the whole thing being turned inside out, rather than one bag being reversed (if that makes sense?! I’m not sure it does). Anyway, I sewed the 2 bags together at the top, remembering to put in the button tab and voila!