Three Little Black Bags Go to the City!

Well, two of them are black, but the third one is just as sophisticated because it's made out of an Urban Outfitter's shopping bag and has a genuine dogtag chain for a strap!  The black bags are made from an onion bag (on the left) and a Kettle bag (on the right).  We designed these for Laura Oltman, who lives in Brooklyn, and manages a small clothing shop in Park Slope.  She wanted a small shoulder bag, in black with abstract designs, to wear with summer dresses.

Even though we're currently deep in the frozen belly of winter, it's nice to think of Laura walking down 7th Avenue wearing her black bag with a breezy summery dress.  We love these bags so much, and we think it's amazing how sophisticated and big city our humble materials look!  You can order your own on the Small Shoulder Bags page.  Specify black and either Kettle or onion bag material.  (Black onion bags are getting extremely rare, but we'll do our best.)

Exciting New/Used Materials!

To the left is our standard wallet made of a new silky smooth but very strong Asian pear (or apple, banana, or pineapple or mango!) material from a bag of dried fruit chips from a grocery store in Asheville.  The colors and design are spectacularly beautiful. 

Below the pear wallet is one made from a Kettle's new Tias corn chips bag-- great intensity of color with the strong blue shown here as well as a fine burnt orange.


You can order these wallets in the Kettle and King Arthur section, which we are going to rename Food Bags (as distinguished from Feed Bags) since we're carrying additional kinds of food packaging material now.

We have friends in Michigan and New Hampshire as well as Asheville who have been sending us some lovely horse feed bags.  If you're a horse-lover, this is a great fun wallet to carry.  You can order horse wallets from the Feed Bags catalog page.  We have lilac, light green, and pink as the dominant bag colors in addition to the colors shown here.

Coffee bags smell wonderful in addition to being strong, colorful, and graphically interesting.  We made these two checkbook covers for some friends out of their favorite coffee bags.  We had never done so much piecing of material before, but the small size of the bags made it necessary, and we love the quilted effect that resulted.  So we're adding coffee bag material to our checkbook, standard, Shara, grab 'n' go, and ultra slim wallet possibilities. 

Coffee bag material is a heavy film in most cases.  If you have a favorite bag, send us a few and we'll make up whatever you want out of it.  If you only have one, we can still do the job but will have to piece it out with material we have on hand.  if you want it made from your coffee bags only, send us at least three bags.
 
Our final new material this time is a gorgeous new bird seed bag from an Asheville friend.  We've used it here to make our new BIG wallet, called the Shara after the friend who asked us to design it based on a large leather wallet that she had.  The Shara has ten credit card slots inside, two billfold cases, a coin purse, and a small notebook.  You can order your own Shara on the NEW Big Wallets catalog page.  (This is the same wallet we featured a few posts back, so scroll back until you come to the painted version, which also shows the inside.)

Wallets as Piggy Banks-- the Hardest Working Wallets of All!

During the month that Piece Work's studio has been closed for the holidays, I've been traveling around the northeast visiting family.  As usual, I was curious about the state of any wallets we had planted there.  Last spring when I was in New Hampshire, two of my little grandsons had wanted me to make wallets for them.  This was nine months ago, and theirs is a very active and relaxed household, so I was stunned to learn that they still had both wallets in their possession, and that, amazingly, both kids knew exactly where they were!

These wallets were definitely cases of field surgery, so I was really surprised to see that they looked about the same after nine months of very hard use.  I had had no sewing machine or patterns or anything else I usually use to make a wallet.  The kids had wanted Kettle wallets just like one I was carrying at the time.  So we went to the co-op and bought two bags of blue-flavored Kettle chips.  I approximated a pattern and used dental floss to sew the wallets.  The boys both wanted small notebooks but no coin purses or credit card cases.

You can imagine my surprise the other day when six-year-old Luca showed me his wallet, which had no closing elastic or button (his choice) but was somehow managing to carry about ten dollars in coins (I think gravity was holding it together) and a gift card for a bookstore.  Then eight-year-old Tallis brought his wallet in.  He had asked for a button and tie, which we had made out of some yarn, and his wallet still looked pristine and new.  Inside he had his life savings-- $25 in one-dollar bills.  He also had a gift card tucked away.  When we went to Borders' to cash in the gift cards, the boys lugged their wallets and pulled them out to pay, augmenting the gift cards with cash from their wallet-banks.

Holiday Traveling! (and holiday gifts)

If you're standing in the security line at JFK with a two-year-old clinging to your leg and both hands clutching carry-on bags, you don't need the added fun of having to search for your passport and boarding pass while your phone's ringing from somewhere deep within one of your bags.  Piece Work's small bag lets you keep your passport, boarding pass, smart (or not-so-smart) phone, and a few sticks of gum within easy reach with no frantic searching needed.  And when you're trying to come up with last minute gift ideas, think first of Piece Work wallets and other things-- easy to pack, easy to ship, and everybody enjoys having a new wallet to play with!

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!