quilted wallets

My sisters each got a plastic bag wallet for their second Christmas/birthday presents this year. Playing around with folds, I found a way to have one completely blank side for the wallet base.

I cut the handles and bottom seam off of my bag first and laid it flat so that the pigmented area is on one side.

Unfortunately, my tutorial only works for bags with a blank back :-(

Next fold the bag up (yellow lines). Your folds should be as far apart as you want the width of your finished wallet.


I chose to fold my bag in half, but you just want to fold it down until the total length equals the combined height of the front, back, and flap.








Here you can see how the wallet will fold up once you are done decorating it. I try to keep both sides of the flap blank, or at least decorate both sides of the flap.










Here are both wallets after decoration and quilting. I chose to pin my plastic cut-outs down to my base and quilt everything at the same time. You could also applique plastic cut-outs (or any other decorative material) down after quilting the base.

Here are the backs of my wallet pieces. You can see how I've chosen to decorate my flaps.

The lily wallet is for Elizabeth. To make the white of the lily I cut the flower shape out of the blue background. The dots on the petals were especially difficult because they were to small to pin down. I ended up holding each one down with the point of pin as I sewed it.

The Chinese text is part of a sentence I cut out of an Asian market bag. I think it says, "for shopping here" :-P

The partial sun face on the lily wallet, as well as the one on the rabbit wallet, were cut from a Mexican food market bag.

I used Velcro circles as my closure mechanism. I inherited them from my mother (waste not, want not) but I would probably buy them for this project anyways.

You want to consider how much stress you're putting on the plastic fabric. And you can reduce that stress by having a larger closure (bigger Velcro circle, button, snap, etc). I also like Velcro because it's flexible.

Emily's wallet features a field of rabbits, which I thought would be appropriate given her work with a local bunny shelter. I made the rabbits by drawing the image on paper, pinning it to the plastic bag, and cutting them out together. I reused the paper rabbit image, and cut around it for the additional colors.

Anything on the front of the wallet will be obscured by the flap, so make sure the design is still attractive when the wallet is closed.

And of course, you can't give a wallet empty (it's bad luck).

Oh, and you may have noticed some unfinished edges on these wallets. I ran a zig-zag stitch around the edges of the flap to prevent it from fraying, but I would have either hemmed it or bound it with a fabric edge had I thought of that before sewing up the sides of the wallet.

Summary: Each wallet takes one plastic grocery bag plus scraps for decoration. Assembly probably takes a half hour total, but then decoration could take hours. I opened and closed them several times and was happy with their proformance, but we'll see how they hold up over time.