More Japanese craft books — handmade wallets

I did not men­tion in my pre­vi­ous post that, when I bought those Komi­hi­nata books, I also bought two other Japan­ese craft books about small things (or “komono,” as we call them in Japan).  These books are both on hand­made wallets. One book is called “Hand­made Wal­lets,” and the other one is called “More! Hand­made Wal­lets” - both pub­lished by Vogue Japan. It’s pretty rare that I buy craft books on such spe­cial­ized items, but I was hop­ing to learn all the high-level skills asso­ci­ated with wal­let mak­ing. You can tell I was obsessed with wal­lets when I was mak­ing these mini wal­lets.

I was pleas­antly sur­prised to find a wide range of wal­lets dis­cussed in these two books. There are tra­di­tional folded wal­lets with many com­part­ments, L-shaped ones, clutch purse-like ones, ones with metal frames, and even those tiny “mac­aron” coin purses that have been wildly pop­u­lar in Japan for the last few years.

Here are some pages from the books.

Beau­ti­ful, aren’t they? In addi­tion to the many designs the books con­tain, I love that the pub­lish­ers included sev­eral fab­ric vari­a­tions for each design. You can see how a wal­let would look com­pletely dif­fer­ent when the fab­ric choice is different.

So how many of these have I made so far? None. That’s right, not one. It prob­a­bly has some­thing to do with my lazi­ness in fol­low­ing other people’s sewing instruc­tions, com­pounded by the inher­ent com­plex­ity of wal­let mak­ing. I mean, just look at this page from the “how to make” section.

Does it make your head spin? It totally spins mine. Look at the sheer num­ber of lit­tle fab­ric pieces to cut.… I did read most of the instruc­tions though. I pored over them at every oppor­tu­nity over the sum­mer hol­i­days, when I did not do any sewing. I do this a lot with craft books actu­ally — just read the instruc­tion pages like a novel, with­out mak­ing anything.

But these wal­lets are just too beau­ti­ful. So yes, one of these days I will make one. One of these days…