Strawberry Crochet

This past week I bought a 250GB external hard drive, the kind that can fit in your pocket, in bright red! All of the reviews on NewEgg said that it was a great hard drive and the enclosures were beautiful, except some of the users

commented, "It looks good, until you take it out of the packaging and set it on the table. Then it magically gets scratched." or "If you look at it funny it will scratch the outer surface." So, I took it upon myself to make an enclosure that would be pretty and functional!

With some crazy crocheting abilities I made a strawberry that matched my hard drive's exterior perfectly! I also tried to make a pattern so people could try to reproduce it, but despite my best efforts I did not keep count well enough. I'll try to figure it out at a later time and post it up here. As can be seen in the picture, it's composed of a red body with separate green fronds and yellow french knot seeds.

I was looking for a more cartoon like feel with this piece, less about realism more about fun! Also, I needed to have access to the hollow strawberry that holds the hard drive with some consistency, so I attached the fronds with some adorable light green buttons. I didn't make any special button holes for the buttons, I instead just slipped them through two triple stitches that were placed next to each other. I also started the frond in a round, leaving a great hole in the middle for the hard drive's USB cord. When I was stitching the body of the strawberry, I created a warped effect toward the lobes near the top, and it worked surprisingly well when I decreased from there to create a realistic strawberry charm.

I stuffed the empty space around the hard drive with polyfill, so it keeps it's shape. I know what you're saying, "But doesn't the cause the hard drive to over heat with all of that insulation?" No! It's doesn't because it's not a mechanical hard drive it's flash memory so, no moving parts. While I was making the strawberry at one point it looked very much like a cute red top hat.

And boy is my cat a ham for the camera!