A Travel Wallet Designed by a Traveler

My friend Norma Hawthorne travels frequently to Oaxaca, Mexico, where she directs a travel and learn program (oaxacaculture.com). The other night she and some other friends were in town, and as we sat talking over dinner Norma asked me if we could design a case for her to conveniently carry her passport.  She got her idea from looking at the small Shara that I was carrying.  We threw ideas back and forth for a while-- she needed something BRIGHT and easy to spot, light enough to hang around her neck, easy to open, and easy to remove the passport from for stamping.  The case shown above is what we came up with.  I love it and plan to make one for myself as soon as possible.

The case opens like a Shara, only instead of a button and elastic closing it has a small strip of velcro in order for everything to be as flat and light as possible.  I had a lime-green bag from fish food, thanks to some pond-owning friends, and best of all the print on the bag was in Spanish!  So the case is slick and light and bright and filled with little fishy images and interesting text.  We adapted a neck strap design by combining our small bag strap and our wallet elastic closing.  The back cover of the passport slides right in to the right side inside flap of the case, making it easy to flip the passport open if it only needs to be shown.  When it needs stamping, it can easily be removed from the flap.  The flap on the inside left can be left empty for extra lightness, but it could also be used for boarding passes, a stick of gum, or a little piece of paper with a calming mantra written on it for airport trials and tribulations.

These babies aren't in our catalog yet, but if you want us to make one for you, email us at weRpiecework@gmail.com with your needs and ideas.  Passport cases cost the same as Sharas-- $18 including postage and handling.

Notebook Wallets are now Officially HERE!

A few months ago a friend asked me to make her a Shara wallet that could be used as a notebook or journal cover.  She wanted a coin purse on the back flap, and enough space in the spine of the cover to fit a journal that was about 3/4" thick.  I made the cover for her, and then she made a small Coptic bound book using pieces of recycled cereal box for the front and back covers, which she slipped into the flaps.  Another friend saw her book and asked me if I could make one for her, only she wanted me to sew in the pages, to make a permanent book rather than a book cover.  No problem.  And I liked the way that one looked so much that I made one for myself.

Then when I was in New Hampshire last month visiting my son and his family, he asked me to make a notebook for him to keep notes about his chickens.  Naturally he wanted it made out of a Purina chicken feed bag.  So now we've decided to start carrying these handy notebooks for you to order.

Here are the features from which you may choose:  either a book cover or a book;  whatever size you would like-- just tell us length, width, and spine thickness;  a coin purse or not;  a credit card case or not;   and your choice of color, material, etc.  You should also specify what kind of paper you want in your notebook:  regular writing paper (with or without lines), drawing paper, lightweight watercolor sketching paper, colored paper.  If you have a certain kind of paper that you love, tell us what it is and we'll try to find it for you.  You can also mix and match paper-- some drawing paper, some lined writing paper, even some tracing paper.

If you order a book cover, the cost is $15 plus $3 shipping and handling.  If you want us to make the book sewn into the cover, we will have to add the cost of paper.  Unless it's a very expensive paper, the price of the book will range between $ 20 and $30.  We think the best way to handle these orders is via email, at least for now.  It may turn out that people are pretty standard in their wishes for these books and book-wallet hybrids.  In that case we'll make a catalog page for books.  So let us know if we can make a wallet-book or a book cover or a book for you.  Email us at weRpiecework@gmail.com with your specs. 

Hen and Chicks in the Garden

We've been making lots and lots of Baby Sharas with chicken themes lately.  For some reason the pink and orange chicken one has rocketed to peak popularity,  with the blue chicken Baby Shara in close second place. 

We just shipped off a box of wallets & things to the new museum shop at the South Bend Art Museum in South Bend, Indiana!  So if you're in the South Bend area, be sure to check out the museum and stop by the gift shop to see Piece Works in person and choose your OWN favorite!

Is There ANYTHING We won't do for Our Customers??

The other day I was delivering some wallets to some people who work at our local bagel store.  While I was there, another worker asked me if we had any wallets with owls on them.  I told her I would check, but I had severe doubts.  I went into a nearby grocery later that day (since a check of our materials depot had made it clear that owls are scarce on pet food and potato chip and coffee bags)  hoping to find some new brand of something that would be a good material.  As I rounded a corner near the produce section, there was a display of wine, and to my great excitement the label had a fine woodcut of an owl on it!  I made the sacrifice of buying not one but two bottles (labels can be really hard to remove, and I didn't want to have only one to try with).  That night my husband and I enjoyed the pinot grigio while I finessed the label off using Citrisolve.  It took almost half a bottle of wine to finally get the label off!

I brought the label to the bagel place the next day; Amanda, the worker, liked it and said she would like me to use both labels, one on the front and one on the back (shown here), AND she wanted fuschia to be the featured color.

Well, fuschia is a color that just doesn't show up very much in our materials, but we did find some on an otherwise red bag of dog food, so we trimmed it out in as much fuschia as we could glean from the red bags we had on hand.  Whew!  Good thing we had another bottle of the pinot to ease the process!

The moral of the story is:  even if you think your wallet idea is crazy impossible, tell it to us, and we WILL figure out a way to make it a reality!

A NEW Smaller Big Wallet!

We love our Sharas and Shara's Moms so much that when a friend asked if we could make one for her that would fit into her new smallish bag, we decided to have a go at it.  The result:  a Shara that measures only a little bigger than a 3 x 5" index card -- 5 1/2 x 3 1/4"-ish to be more exact-- and yet it holds as much as a standard Shara.  It's small enough to slip into some side pockets, easy to carry in most bags, and all without sacrificing much in carrying capacity.  (There ARE some situations in which you would do better with a standard Shara or Shara's Mom, such as if you regularly carry lots of bills or change or dozens of pictures or really love a ten-slot credit card case; so these baby Sharas are NOT replacing our wonderful regular Sharas and Shara's Moms.)

The view above shows an opened Baby Shara.  The credit card case in this one is made of clear material and has five slots.  The coin purse is large, and we've designed pleated sides to make it easier to get into.  There are bill fold pockets directly under the coin purse as well as under each side flap.

The view below shows two more possibilities for these wallets.

And the very bottom image  shows the inside of the cat wallet in the first image.  It has a Kettle material credit card slot.

 Order your Baby Shara on the Big Wallets page.  The price is the same as a regular Shara because it takes us just as long to make a little Shara as a big one.

New Look for Piece Work Wallets & Things

We hope you enjoy our new look and that it makes it easier for you to find your way around our blog and discover exactly what you're looking for.  As we develop new designs and different ways to use our materials, we're moving toward sorting our things by style rather than by material.  Our catalog pages are still basically the same (although we've edited the titles to better reflect the new design-based categories), but soon we will be combining all the standard wallets onto one page instead of breaking them down into the four materials categories that we have them in now.  And the step after that will be to make it possible for you to click on the categories right under the masthead in order to get to the catalog page you want. 

We also have a few new designs in the works-- one that's a small version of our big Shara wallets,  one that is a sleeked-down version of our standard wallet,  one that's a re-thinking of the Ultra Slim, and one that's a slightly larger version of the already big Shara.  As always, these designs are driven by what YOU tell us you want.  We really enjoy designing and finding ways of using new materials.  So keep your ideas coming!  And please let us know how your wallets and things are working for you and what we can do to make them better.

Consider a Business Checkbook!

Our friends Sarah and Shara have a small business called Haven & Hill.  They concoct and sell yummy bath and body products.  Recently when I was in New Hampshire visiting with them, they said they needed a checkbook cover for their business account.  They had given me some samples of their soaps and bath bombs and creams, so I peeled a label from one and incorporated it in this checkbook cover.  The background is from a chicken feed bag that has a sophisticated color scheme and lovely graphic of a farm scene, which reminded me of the rural area where Sarah and Shara both live.

You'll notice that the checkbook cover is being elegantly and professionally held by a super lovely and pale hand that has long fingernails.  I found this mannequin hand in my travels through the garment district in NYC with friends recently.  It seems to say "This is an elegant  business checkbook cover, even if it's made out of a chicken feed bag."

(Note to Sarah and Shara:  I'm putting your checkbook cover in the mail tomorrow.)