Share
A wallet is the only object you own that is entirely about cost. You open it to find out what you can afford. You close it once you have decided.
I made this one around a sentence I keep returning to: if it costs your peace, it's too expensive.
It was meant to be small. Small enough that you forget it is in your pocket, or clipped to a belt loop, which is how I carry mine. It takes the new ID card, a few bank cards, and enough money for a journey - however far you decide to go. I kept taking millimetres off it until it could not lose anything else without losing its use.
What follows is what it takes to make one. Not because the process is impressive, but because almost nobody sees it, and I think the not-seeing is why handmade things look overpriced from the outside.
The leather goes into the press first. Black, flat, unremarkable. Under heat and weight, under a die I drew and cut myself. The temperature and the timing stay in the workshop, and so does the die. It comes out changed, the pattern raised into the hide, permanent, and never quite the same twice. The emerald and the royal blue come after, in the places where light will catch them.
Then the holes. Each one punched with a chisel, by hand, every one at the same distance from the last. There is no machine in this part and no way to hurry it. If the spacing drifts, the stitching drifts, and you see it forever.
The edges take longer than anyone expects. Tokonole, burnished, left to dry, burnished again, until nothing can be felt under a finger. This is the part nobody buys a wallet for, and the part everybody notices when it is missing - the cheap edge that splits and furs within a year.
Then glue, and the waiting for it to set. Then the stitching: two needles, one thread, one stitch at a time, all the way around. Hours of it. It is the part I like most and the part I cannot explain to anyone who has not done it.
There is no faster way.
I was thinking about leaving when I made this one. About the particular happiness of the morning you set out, when you still do not know what you will find. And about peace, mostly. That was the first thing.
One wallet. When it sells, I do not make it again.
