In Between Laundry: Tutorial: How to Create a Personalized iPhone Case

Isn't my little phone so cute? Something about it is just so me! Ha!

I have an iPhone 4 and created this little cover back in October or November with the intent of sharing how to do it, but time got away from me.

And now Picnik (which is how I designed my cover) is going away in April. Isn't that sad? So I knew that I had to act quick and get this tutorial out in case anyone might want one, too.

1. The first thing I did was start on Picnik.com with a plain white canvas, so to speak. You'll want to check out my tutorial here on how I always get a blank slate for beginning a project like this.

2. Once you have a blank slate, you will resize it to be 751 x 1414 pixels. I ordered my case from Zazzle.com and those are the recommended demensions. If you wanted to order from another company (I don't know of another company, but you might be able to find better prices out there), you'll want to check their image specs first.

3. Then, under the Edit tab, select Stickers. During the next couple of months, everyone gets free Premium service from Picnik so it's a great time--though limited-- to do some fun projects.

4. I used the Common Symbols stickers and selected the one that looks like a staircase. I expanded it to fit across the whole rectangle.

5. Then I rotated it to become a horizontal staircase and repeated it to create a chevron pattern. To repeat the image, right click and select Duplicate Image.

6. This time, I selected a dark navy color for my bottom shade and adjusted the fade by 10% for each zigzag line going up to make an ombre chevron.

7. Now you can play around with stickers and text until you have a design you love. Save the image and go to Zazzle.com. The link that will take you straight to the iPhone 4 cases is http://www.zazzle.com/custom/cases/iphone. I chose the Barely There design.