so I made another bifold wallet based off of my previous designs

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  improved leather bifold wallet

  by anymany

  Illustration

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  (Everyone)

by the way, this wallet is STILL being used after a year and a half of use, It still looks fine, nothing is pealing, the stitching is still going strong, nothing has ripped. with that being said, the leather I used wasn't even the best one I could get my hands on so I expect this wallet to last at least 5 years without having to do much care, after a while, some Ironing and washing and polishing would bring it back to life. I am working on making home made versions of leather care products.

I really like most of this design but something that I felt was missing from it was some height. the paper bills sometimes stuck up above the lip and one side of them would get really tattered. I added 1 cm of height to alleviate the problem.

I also added a pocket underneath the side card pockets seen by the little black Vcard shown on picture #1. the added height also allowed me to add another card slot. this put the MINIMUM amount of cards this wallet can hold at FOURTEEN cards, if you double stack them that's TWENTYEIGHT, plus bills.

the stitching was a nightmare, in picture #2 you can see that in order to add the pockets and the center flap I had to divide it into 3 pieces which then came together and then connected to the main backing of the wallet which made the money pocket. what this means is that I had to cut, thread, sew, and melt, a total of 14 times.

speaking of sewing, I really liked how it turned out, I have pretty much perfected being able to sew a clean looking double stitch which should prevent unraveling, another good thin about it is that I was able to wrap the stitch around the top of the edge which should also help to prevent splitting around the corners.

because of the added complexity, this wallet is thicc with 2 Cs and it would have been thicker but I was able to skive down some pieces to about half the thickness, it reduced the thickness by about quarter of an inch and I do have some plans to do the same to more pieces, hopefully thinning it by a half an inch. I should mention that in picture #4, the wallet is 1 1/2 thick, that is with 14 cards and bills which added 1/2 inch of thickness to it. that does leave the empty wallet at 1inch thick but once I can think some other bigger pieces with a leather splitter, the final thickness would be at about 3/4 of an inch which is about the size of most commercial cheap wallets

another thing that I've been getting better at is edging. since It's a vegtan leather, I put some tragacanth gum and it allows me to get very nice polished edges, I recently got a leather edger which helps me bevel the edges and making the edges rounder rather than square. I think next time I would like to round out the corners too, to make it look like one continuous edge, edging leather leads to a really nice result.

I think the next pieces of equipment I'd like to get are:

1. acrylic shapes of all the pieces, so I can outline them quickly with an awl
2. splitting machine to thin out the certain leather pieces more, thinning them took 2 hours
3. stich liner, Im using a compass to outline the stitching path but it's not as accurate as I would like
4. heat imprinter and logo so that I could stamp out logos

the heat imprinter and splitting machine are rather expensive to that will have to wait a little.

I am pretty happy with how it ended and I think I finally have the last prototype before I actually start selling them.

that being said, I would also like to add a few other simpler models, like one without the center flap or pockets, and one that can only hold about 2-4 cards and some cash for the most minimalists.

I do wonder where I'll sell them since I heard that Etsy isn't a great site anymore for hand made Items.