Tardis Beaded Wallet

How to make a cheap dollar store coin purse/wallet into a customized Dr. Who loving piece of fan gear.  Basic sewing/beading skills required, but a beginner should have a pretty easy time of it.

Any pleather/fake leather wallet and or coin purse would work fine for this project. I used black for the outer space look, but there’s no reason other colors wouldn’t do, and may give you a chance to work up some different environments. The Tardis lands everywhere after all J

Besides the wallet you will need:

Scissors

Thread: Black and sturdy

Clear nail polish, or clear drying glue

Beading needle/ regular needle depending on the size of your beads

Beads (The most uniform you have, idealy a bit higher grade than generic seed beads to make a tighter fit), for the Tardis size and form I used you will need:

White mat or off white:  6

Dark Mat Blue or grey: 210

Silver/bright metallic: 68

Bluest Tardis Blue: 248

Black: 160, or more if you’d like more background

This is bare minimum, not counting insensible losses to vacume cleaners, gravity, Daleks, and Vashta Narada

Plus: Larger and varied beads for your background/ skyscape. I used a mix of dark blues, blacks, greys, silver, and a few crystal beads. You’ll want two sets, large and small, preferably with different colors that compliment each other.

I used a technique called peyote to make my tardis, I’ve included a full peyote pattern for those interested in using this method. For anyone who would like to try, but isn’t familiar with it, check out the “Peyote beaded ring” instructable by diylesson. This is a very good demo of the skill.

If you don’t want to venture into this technic, you can use the pattern as a schematic and simply stitch individual beads to the wallet. This will a be a bit more time consuming but can easily look just as good.

Since some people may be attaching the Tardis as they construct it, I will note here that I purposely placed it at an angle, for two reasons:

1.       The Tardis is never shown flying in anything resembling a straight line, so for continuity sake, an angle felt better

2.       When the bead Tardis is squared up on a seam of the wallet, it tends to look awkward and unappealing, although I can’t put my finger on why.

 

For those using a peyote technique, align the Tardis however you see fit on your wallet and stitch the edges down through the wallet, You might want to work one end to the other to avoid a distortion of the beads. A thin needle works best for this so that you don’t risk popping the thread you used to weave the beads together. Once the edges are secured, one end to the other, start working through the body of the Tardis to add strength. This doesn’t need to be as closely stitched since it is mostly for insurance.

To provide a “Back bone” for my outer space design, I started with the larger set of beads, making some loose spirals that brushed against each other. I must admit that this design is heavily influenced by the Van Gogh episode in Fifth season. These loose spirals proved the structure to pattern the smaller beads after. I wanted just a couple loose swoops away from the Tardis on the front, to indicate inertia/time dilation/insert-tech-justification-here.

The large beads are fixed by simply sewing them on one at a time. I started at one edge seam of the wallet, securing the thread, then running through each bead twice before moving to the next one. Since this is a loose patter precision is not necessary.

I also decided to add a stripe of large beads between the zippers, as they seemed to naturaly fit there. This may not work, depending on the wallet you used. These beads were fixed to the wallet in the same manner, although with extra care because they will likely receive more abuse/tortion than the rest.

Next came the smaller beads, I wanted these to look more like the back drop of the larger beads, so while the remain more of less within the confines of the larger spirals, they also carry their own pattern. For the small beads I used a mixture of plastic and glass beads, both shiny and mat to provide contrast. I also didn’t want to completely fill the area, so I purposely left “blank” spaces where the black wallet shows through. For the front, I kept my distortion theme going, showing light blue beads flaring off of the top and sides of the Tardis “in motion”

I used the same technique as with the large beads, although I only stitched each small bead once, as opposed to twice with the larger beads. Keeping the stitches tight to the beads helps them to stay in place better and makes for a more compact and fluid look. See the final pictures for the finnished effect:

And now your Time And Relative Dimension In Space wallet is complete! Enjoy! I used clear nail polish to lock off the threads in the back, clear drying glue would also work, or just knots if you have faith in your knot-tieing ability.

Warning: Wallet doesn't not travel in time, is not bigger on the inside, nor does it contain Chris Eccelson, David Tenant or Matt Smith... unfortunetly.