Zippered Leather Card Wallet (with Free Pattern)

Hello all, hope you are doing well. Today i bring to you this cute little leather wallet i made with leather scraps and minimal supplies. I am a beginner in leather work, so forgive me if my techniques are not the best, and do let me know how i can improve.

Hope you like it!

To make this you will need:

• Leather scraps
• Plastic card
• Metal zipper
• Leather glue (I am using fevibond from pidilite)
• Leather punch
• Awl
• Metal ruler
• Box cutters
• Needles and thread for sewing

I recently bought a ton of leather scraps from a local craft shop. So this first thing i did to to single out pieces larger than the size of a standard card.

I ended up with choosing black leather and one burgundy piece to add as a pop of colour. But having each piece a separate colour would also look pretty neat.

Since my leather came squished in a pretty tiny bag, it was creased pretty heavily. To straighten it out a used a technique with is normally used to wet-form leather.

I filled a pail with room temperature water and let it soak for about 30 mins. If your leather keeps floating to the surface you can put a weight on it. Once soaked i laid it all out flat on my cutting mat and let it dry for 24 hours.

I have attached a pdf for the pattern for pieces you will need (apologise my horrible pdf skills).

Simply print out the pdf on a4 sized paper, and cut out the required pieces using a ruled and box cutters.

For me the most difficult part of this wallet was preparing the zipper.

You first need to glue down the excess bit of fabric on the end on the zipper. Be sure to glue it down and not cut it so that the fibres don't come undone with use. I used my leather glue to fold and glue down the excess making bat wings of sorts.

I then cut the zipper to the exact length of the wallet. opened 4-5 teeth at the end of the zipper and clipped them using wire cutters. This part was pretty difficult and frankly kind of scary so unfortunately i could not take proper photos. I would suggest buying a short zipper if you can. I then stuck a small piece of leather on the open end so that the zip pull doesn't slide off by accident.

The first step was to glue the pieces together, i applied a thin strip of glue on both the pieces and stuck them together.

Then i took both the side pieces and glued them to the zipper. My wallet was looking a little wonky so i trimmed down the sides a little to make it all even.

The first step in sewing leather is punching holes into the leather. i do this my placing my leather piece on a spare piece of pine. Here is a great tutorial going into the details of leather punching better than i could ever explain.

I then stitch the side pieces to the zipper using a saddle stitch, here is the tutorial i followed.

I stuck the side flap onto one base panel wrong side facing each other, i then made holes on the side and stitched it all together.

i then folded the side flap in half and stuck it to the other side, and using an awl punched holes into it (as it was difficult to punch holes on this angle. and stitch that together

I then stitched up the two remaining sides and that was it!

This was such an easy and quick project, really great for beginners like me to start out with leather crafts.

Hope you found this project good, and well explained (i found it a bit difficult to write out instructions). Please to let me know in the comments and do share if you end up making it.

Thanks Happy DIYing!