Where Our Buttons Come From

Today was a dark and gloomy winter day.  We were working hard to fill some recent big orders.  At one point we spread out all our button baskets on the kitchen counter so we could scrabble through them more easily as we searched for the perfect button for each wallet.  When we spread out the baskets it was as if the sun had come out.  The rich colors of the buttons reminded us of spices in a marketplace; so we took this picture to show you some of our button collection as it lit up the studio on this cloudy day. 

We get these buttons from all over.   Many of them are donated to us by friends who have old button collections.  We find others in flea markets and antique stores.  Most fun of all is finding old pins and bits of jewelry and other odd things in among the old buttons.  One of my favorite finds was a set of old shorthand and typing speed contest pins.

Sketchbook Wallets are Here!

For several months now we've been playing around with making sketchbook or journal wallets out of our recycled materials.  We've sold a few to friends.  Yesterday I made a new one for myself, and it's posted here.  The journal behind the new one is an opened-out old one from several months ago.  If you want to talk with us about designing one for you, email us at weRpiecework@gmail.com.  We can make them any size and shape you want, with or without pockets, coin purses, or other options.  They are most similar to our Shara wallets, and they cost between $19 and $25, depending on whether you want us to sew in the paper or just make a cover into which you can slip your own paper.

You Too Can Have Cathy WIlliams' New Chicken Wallet

Cathy Williams asked me to make a chicken wallet in a newish design that we at Piece Work call a Baby Shara (because it's a smaller version of our Shara wallet, which is named after the customer who requested the custom design that lead us to make  our most popular line of wallets).  Anyway, today I fb'ed Cathy that her wallet was done, and she suggested I post it in case other chicken lovers out there might like to have one of these as a holiday gift.

  You can order a chicken Baby Shara here on our blog.  But order right away, as our list of orders to fill in the next three weeks is getting rather alarmingly long!

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!