It's not going to explode!

After I made Nettie's case, Ned (and Martijn) started getting the idea that they needed one too! Of course, Martijn's tastes are a little more, shall we say, subdued than mine. He needed a MAN CASE! I had this piece of corduroy in my stash and we bought a piece of tan fleece for the inside. The faux leather button finished it off nicely I think!

Now, to address something else. There seems to be a misconception that fleece will cause static sparks and damage, explode, or otherwise destroy your laptop. Taking into consideration that MANY of the commercially available cases are lined with fleece and both the Simplicity and McCall's patterns I looked at called for fleece as a lining, I thought I should be hearing a LOT more about fleece related static damage. It seemed to me that the manufacturers would've taken this into consideration, and guess what? They did.

From the craftzine blog:

Laptops are designed to handle and dissipate static electricity through a safe channel. As long as you're not sticking the thing up to a Van de Graaff generator, a little shock now and then won't harm it. You'll see static warnings when you go to do things like add more RAM to your computer, because those chips and the exposed circuitry is sensitive to static, but when it's all closed up, the metal bits that the shock goes to are most likely connected to the computers common ground, directing the static away from any sensitive parts.

I e-mailed a case manufacturer about the possibility of their fleece-lined cases causing damage to the laptops. Their response was that they'd not had any customer complaints regarding static damage that they felt could be caused by their cases.

Last but not least, I sent a support request to Acer. I asked if using a fleece lined case was safe. Their response:

Kim, it is safe to use fleece lined sleeve for covering the system.

So, there you go. It isn't an issue to use fleece on your laptop cases. I wouldn't open it up and rub fleece all over the exposed circuitry, but who would do that in the first place?!

P.S. Here's the new button on Nettie's case, it's actually functional and not just cute!