Secret Compartment!

We've been quiet on this blog for a while now, but we've been busy in our studio.  We've had an unusually high number of orders for the past three months, which is fine with us; and we've also been working on some new modifications of our most popular designs.  One of these modifications happened by accident while we were working to find a better way to make flaps for coin purses.  We had been bothered by the tendency of clear plastic flaps to begin over time to tear in the right angle that formed at the junction of the flap and the back of the coin purse.

I had been carrying a Teeny Weeny Shara for a couple of months, and I had noticed the slight tear in my coin purse flap.  So we took the wallet apart and tried out different ways of doing the flap. It occurred to us that the tear seemed to happen only when the coin purse was made of clear plastic, never when it was made of woven plastic.  After testing various materials, pulling them and twisting them and trying to rip them apart, we had a bolt-of-lightning insight:  the real problem was the right angle!  And we could easily get rid of that devilish angle by making the flap separate from the body of the coin purse. 

In figuring out how to sew the body of the coin purse on beneath the flap, we saw that if we sewed the bottom of the coin purse as well as the bottom edge of the flap to the body of the wallet, we would no longer have the nice little extra pocket at either the top or bottom of the coin purse.  We decided we could live without that little extra slip-in pocket in the interest of having a flap that was secure and not prone to tearing.  Then we noticed that when we sewed the bottom as well as the bottom of the flap down, a second, secret compartment was formed inside the coin purse!

The drawing above as well as the photo show the existence of the two pockets.  My grandson Jacob suggested we make the flap on his wallet solid so that no one could see that there was a second compartment under there.  We liked that idea for his wallet, which had a solid red coin purse.  But for wallets like the chicken one above that have designs on the front of the coin purse, we need clear flaps to avoid cutting off the chicken's head with the solid flap.  But here's a solution:  we will put a Velcro strip inside the top of the secret compartment so that it stays closed until the owner pulls it open. 

One more thing--  if you are the owner of a Shara that develops problems in the coin purse flap after a few months, send the wallet back to us and we will fix it.  Email us for return shipping details.  Satisfaction guaranteed!