We bought my daughter a Chromebook for Christmas which means we now have three laptops laying around the living room. I looked into storage options and found a number of storage sleeves made out of wool felt, mostly designed to hang off of the arm of a couch. None of them were quite what I wanted. I don’t usually make New Year’s resolutions but this year I’ve been pushing myself to try some new crafty things, so I decided to turn this into a learning opportunity and craft one myself!

I started out by doing some research into wool felt and quickly realized why it’s a popular choice. It’s reasonably priced, fairly durable, and easy to work with. I ordered this 3mm thick roll of wool felt from Amazon. It comes in 18″ x 36″ sheets which gave me plenty to work with. The light grey color seemed like it’d look nice in my living room.

I sketched out what I thought would be a really simple design given that this would be my first time working with wool felt. It’s simply a rectangle that’s a tiny bit wider than the width of the laptop and roughly twice as long as its length. The bottom folds up to form a U shape and the flaps on either side fold over and are sewn to fasten them to the front and hold the whole thing together. I positioned the flaps so that the connector for the laptop’s charger would be accessible regardless of which way the laptop was placed into the sleeve.

A lot of the material I read online talked about using patterns to cut out shapes from wool felt, so I considered creating a pattern, but decided that the design was simple enough that it wouldn’t be necessary. I wound up just placing the laptop on the felt, making some measurements, and then using a pencil and a square to mark the cuts I needed to make. I had also ordered myself a nice new pair of fabric scissors so the cutting was quick and painless.

One of my primary motivations for making my own design was that most of the available products were intended to be hung over the arm of a couch, which I didn’t want to do. A few of them advertised that the flap which you would use for hanging them also contained weights so you could alternately lay it across a tabletop or between a mattress and box-spring. I knew I wanted to just hang mine on the wall or on the side of an end table. After some brief research I found out that attaching grommets to fabric is really easy and that looked like it would work perfectly for my project! While you can buy very fancy grommet machines I wanted something cheap since I didn’t have any immediate use for it after this project. I went with this little kit that looked like it fit the bill since it included a manual hole cutter, mandrel for attaching the grommets, as well as 100 grommets (which ought to last me a while), all for a reasonable price.

I didn’t need the grommet placement to be especially precise, I just wanted them near each corner so the weight would be evenly distributed. Placing the grommets on the felt to eyeball the position, and after marking the position of one grommet, I measured it and then marked the position of the other grommets to be evenly spaced. Using the hole cutter and mandrel from the kit I bought to cut holes and attach grommets was very straightforward and I had them all attached in just a few minutes.

I knew that sewing the flaps was going to be the hardest part of this project for me since I hadn’t done any sewing since my Home Ec class back in middle school. Once again I found myself consulting the collective knowledge of the internet, googling things like “how do you sew wool felt”. The consensus seemed to be that a blanket stitch was the proper way to do this and I found this helpful beginner’s tutorial at a site called Oliver Rabbit. I bought myself entirely too much embroidery floss in a lovely variety of colors (only $7, who could resist?) as well as some embroidery needles. Cutting myself a few squares out of the leftover scraps of felt I followed along with the tutorial and sewed a series of lousy stitches until I got the hang of it.

Having spent a few nights practicing I felt confident that I could sew the flaps the way I wanted. I knew it wouldn’t look professional but I felt okay with my hand-made item looking hand-made. ☺ Since this laptop sleeve was intended to hold my daughter’s Chromebook I let her choose the thread color for the stitching; she chose a light blue (her favorite color). I folded the felt into position with the laptop inside at first to ensure the spacing was correct. I inserted a few needles to hold the flaps together and placed a strip or two of scotch tape for good measure. After removing the laptop I began to work my way slowly and carefully sewing a blanket stitch around three sides of the flap and then finished the fourth side (the fold) with a simple straight stitch since it didn’t have an edge. (It sounds so easy when I type it out but rest assured I spent a good chunk of my evening on it!)

The next night I had time I repeated the process on the other flap. The work went faster as I grew more confident in my sewing and I finished it off fairly easily. With both flaps attached the laptop sleeve was complete!

I checked that the Chromebook still fit comfortably and felt good about my progress. All I needed to do to finish up was hang it in the spot I had selected! I had a pile of 3M Command Hooks laying around (I love those things, I use them all over the place), and since I wanted to hang the sleeve on the side of an end table I thought they’d be perfect for that purpose, and wouldn’t leave a mark if I decided to move the whole thing later. These Command White Light Strips seemed like exactly the right size.

I positioned the sleeve against the side of the end table roughly where I wanted it, grabbed my level to make sure it wasn’t crooked (that bothers me so much!), and fastened it temporarily with a bit of scotch tape. I marked the location of the grommets on the wood with a pencil then took the sleeve off. Attaching the command hooks one by one, I tried to make sure they wound up with their hooks in a place that would line up with the grommets. I decided to mount the bottom pair with their hooks pointing downward so that they’d hold the sleeve in place when my daughter pulled her laptop out. Command strips can hold a surprising amount of weight so I wasn’t worried about having just two of them supporting things.

Getting the grommets fastened onto the hooks required me to stretch the felt slightly (I guess my hook positioning wasn’t perfect), but they popped right in and it felt nice and secure. I slid the laptop in and it fit nicely, with plenty of room to plug in the power cable like planned.

Overall I was happy with how this project turned out! I learned some new things and it works well for its intended purpose. (If I can get my daughter to actually put her laptop away when she’s done using it it’ll be even better!) I spent a fair amount on supplies (probably about $80, I bought two rolls of felt and that includes the scissors), but I plan to make a few more of these for the other laptops in our house so I feel okay about that. Having done it all once I feel pretty confident I could make another one in a single night.