Old School Arts & Crafts

After two years of dealing with a phone that had only 8gig of data, my phone was grinding to a halt. Things were taking forever to load. Every time I deleted an app for more space my remaining apps would get together and decided to update, taking all the newly free space. It was as if they were trying to tell me that new apps just weren't welcome.

Okay, phone, I get the message. So yesterday we went to the mall and upgraded. Now I have a glorious 32gig of space to play with. It's like a dream. I went and reloaded all of the apps I had uninstalled due to a lack of space. Heaven.

With any new phone I have to spend the first few days making it my own. I installed a theme with a matching flowery background, moved all of my apps and photos over, and put all my icons into folders.

But there was one more thing I needed to do to truly personalize it. The cover. I got a clear plastic gel cover with silver edging at the mall. Its back is transparent. The serial number sticker is right in the middle of the back of the phone. I was going to peel it off, but then I figured I would just cover it up. I did this with my last phone, and I was excited to do it again.

First I did a Google image search to find free images I loved. I searched things like "flower fabric", "purple flower wallpaper", etc. For my husband's phone I searched "Nintendo phone wallpaper". Here's my folder of potential pictures.

My computer is ancient so I imported the pictures to Word and drew a box the size of the phone, overlaying it over the picture so I could choose which part of the pattern would be centered. Then I printed it out on card stock. I used my Slice cutter to cut out holes for the camera and flash, and used my trusty corner punch to round off the corners.

I had a hard time getting the holes tidy on the edges, but I finally had the idea to get the edges smoother by using a couple of paint brush handles to widen the holes slightly. Luckily I had a couple of different sizes.

I actually had to make both backing papers twice, due to a printer malfunction that made the first attempts too short. But it made the second time go much faster. I also tore the camera hole of my husband's cover slightly, so since I had another printed out trying to fix the printer error, I just tried again. Here's what his looks like (before I redid it).

And here's the pattern that I chose. I'm really into drawings of flowers lately, I wonder why, hmm. Curious that.

Then I just popped the paper backing into the gel case and voila. Completely personalized phone. I love it! So yeah, I'm glad I decided to get the cheapest case option, because I made it exactly what I wanted.