New Design!

We had an email from a Shara Buffington in Enfield, New Hampshire, asking us if we could custom design a wallet for her.  She had an old black leather wallet that she wanted us to make out of our materials.  She also wanted a few changes-- a coin purse, a small notebook and a button closure. 

We love design work, and we happened to have some excellent material that suited her wishes as far as colors and theme went (chickens, reds and other warm tones), so we got to work. 

I then made the watercolor above of  the closed wallet (to the left in the painting)  overlapping the opened wallet.  You can see the cover with its great eggy button and serviceable elastic;  to the right you can see the ten credit card slots, coin purse, and sketch/notebook.  You can't see the two billfold sections, but the arrows show you where they are.

We love the way Shara's wallet came out, and after she field-tests it for a few weeks and gives us feedback, we'll make whatever modifications she suggests.  Stay tuned!  We expect to begin selling these larger wallets soon!  They measure around 6 inches high by 3 3/4 inches wide closed.  (Shara wanted to be able to slip it into her bag.)

Meanwhile, gift-giving has commenced, and-- although we did not jump into the Black Friday fray-- we hope you'll think of us when you're looking for small gifts that are super-easy to mail, stunningly light to carry in your luggage if you're traveling and want to bring a few along for gifts,  eminently affordable, and can be custom-made to suit the person you're buying them for.

This is our most exciting new chicken wallet made from material that Fran's sister Redda Loges and her husband Steve Gregory sent to us!  We love this painted image so much that I decided not to do a sketch of it but to scan the real thing so you could appreciate the subtle colors and beautiful tones of this bag.  Redda and Steve sent us a few more of these bags, so if you want us to make one for you, order it on the feed bag catalog page and specify "Redda and Steve's bag" in special instructions, and it's yours!

Overworked Wallet!

Recently my sister-in-law. Mary Daugherty, ordered a red Kettle wallet from us, and when I was visiting her in Michigan last week, I asked her how her wallet was doing.  We are always interested in  how our wallets are doing so that we can learn about any problems in our materials or designs and can work to correct them.  Mary loves her wallet, but she said she had had to fix it with clear tape because it had split slightly across the back seam.  I was upset that this had happened and in such a short period of time, so I asked her some questions about how she had been using it.  Mary said she had been on a trip with the wallet and had stuffed the credit card pocket behind the coin purse full of one dollar bills at the same time she had filled the coin purse with change.  She thought she had just overstuffed the wallet.

Well, an overstuffed wallet can be a problem, but we felt that a well-made wallet should be able to handle some overstuffing, and we started experimenting.  As a result of many tests, we realized that material such as Kettle film tends to tear when stressed along a row of stitching, especially if the stitches are relatively short, resulting in close-together holes.  We then decided to try the wallet without the row of stitching (which we always included in order to divide the back compartment in two in order to separate any cards that people put in there) and see what happened. Here's the revised wallet:

We like the newly-designed wallet very much and think you will, too.  But we still need to field test it, so we're making all of our new Kettle and other plastic film wallets without the back seam.  If you want to test drive one, order it on the Kettle page and specify test-drive on the order page.  We will mail you your wallet, and if you email us information about the performance of this wallet in three months, we'll send you a refund for the price of your wallet.  Also, if you have had a problem with the back of your wallet splitting, please let us know about it by emailing us at weRpiecework@gmail.com and we'll replace your wallet for free with the new design.  We want you to be fully satisfied with your Piece Work wallet!