I Made... A Wallet

I made a wallet.

I might have accidentally left my wallet in the pocket of my jeans that made it through the wash… and it may have ruined it. So decided I wanted to make a new one.

It took a few versions to get right. Initally the prototype was made out of tracing paper, to get the size of the pieces and how it was going to join together correctly.

I really wanted to make it out of canvas, so version 2 I bought a bunch. I had figured it’d be easy to work with however it was a nightmare to stich, in the end I ended up coating it in mod podge to help it hold together while it was stiched. It came out great, but had 2 big problems, the middle pouch for the card wasn’t offset, so the card fell too far and wasn’t easy to access. The second problem was it got dirty fast!

Version 3 I decided to colour with some fabric paint, I used Jacquard Products Olivee Green-Textile Color Paint. On the first attempt I applied this over the mod podge which gave an inconsistent effect, leaving pools of dark and light areas. Switching this so that the paint was applied, then heat set before applying the mod podge gave a much better result. A stich line was also placed in the middle pocket to offset the card. This version was great, however the tension holding the cards in was far too weak and if the wallet was drop or thrown a little the cards would slide out.

Version 4 I applied a seem of elastic to each pouch, which held the cards in, even jolting the wallet as hard as possible left the card retained. The stiching work on this model wasn’t as clean and could do with some improvement when I need to make another one in the future.

Overall very happy with the outcome. More importantly this version is washable thanks to the heat set paint and mod podge!

Template

3 pieces of fabic

• 116mm by 175mm
• 116mm by 135mm
• 116mm by 155mm

These can be cut out of a single piece of fabic 465mm by 116mm