My young sister-in-law loves music (or at least Fall Out Boy) so for her birthday we thought we’d get her a new pair of earbuds and I would cozy them up to avoid tangles and kinks. Here they are:
I went around in my head about how to do the covering, since crocheting a tube in the round that would be as tight as I wanted seemed awkward if not impossible. I ended up doing it semi-flat. My yarn was light worsted (on the level of Caron Simply Soft: marked as 4 but decidedly thinner than a lot of 4s) and I used an E hook (3.5mm)
In dark purple: make a chain the length of the wire, ear to jack. Don’t stretch the chain when measuring but don’t add slack either. Turn and single crochet in top loop only, slightly longer than the doubled part of the earbud wire. Chain to match the leftover starting chain. You now have a Y-shaped piece where the stem of the Y is wider than the arms.
In light purple: Attach at the base of the Y. With the earbud wire enclosed and the jack pointing out the base of the Y, slip stitch the sides of the dark purple strip together to make a tight tube. When you get to the junction of the Y, single crochet up one arm in top loop only. Then slip stitch back down, with a single earbud wire enclosed, earbud itself pointing out the top of the arm, to make the strip you just widened into another tight tube. Repeat on the other arm of the Y: single crochet in top loop only to the top of the arm; slip stitch to form a tube from the top back down the the junction, encasing the wire.
I chose to stitch the arm in the front of the work first (closer to my final loop when I finished joining the base of the Y into a tube). When I got back to the junction the second time, I slip stitched in the back of the base’s last slip stitch so there wouldn’t be a gap in the light purple.
Your slip stitches will likely scrunch the tube so it doesn’t cover the full wire, but you can easily stretch it back out again, tightening the fit at the same time. When slip stitching I caught only one loop of the single crochets and one of the initial chains, and never worked in the back bump of the chain. When you’re done, secure your yarn and then weave it through the tube; there should be a lot of friction to keep it in place.