Wallet Notes
I wrote myself some notes while sewing my Darn Kat wallet. I though they might come in handy for others, so I’m posting them here.
When cutting your fabric for the pieced front, you will need to cut 9 strips of fabric that are 8.5″ wide (side-to-side when looking at your pattern) and 1.75″ long (up and down when looking at your pattern). You can use as many different fabrics as you would like.
It looks like Darn Kat used four, three, and two strips from 3 different fabrics. What I did was use three alternating strips, then one block of fabric in place of the next three, and then the final three strips below that. The reason I chose to do that was that my sweet Los Novios skeleton fabric really needed to be viewed as a scene. Cutting up the design into small strips made the design hard to decipher.
If you chose to do (9) 1.75″ strips, you will sew these pieces together along the 8.5″ side, with 1/4″ seems. This will almost give you your desired dimensions of 8.5″ x 11.5″. If your seams are perfectly 1/4″, you will have an extra 1/4″, giving you dimensions of 8.5″ x 11.75″. When you sew your “Pieced Top” to your “Lining Fabric,” you can easily incorporate into the seam 1/16″ at the top and 1/16″ at the bottom. *For an explanation why, see very end of this post.
Alternatively, if you want to make your middle three strips actually one larger block like I did, you will need to cut six strips 8.5″ x 1.75″ long strips. For the middle block, cut your piece 8.5″ x 4.25″. Sewing these three small, one large, and three small together with 1/4″ seams will give you (my) usual 11.75″ length.
For your upper pocket fabric, DK says that you can use one or two fabrics, and that you’ll need to sew them together on two sides. I decided to just use one, my Los Novios fabric again. One thing to watch out for though, is that you will need to sew your two pieces of fabric together with their patterns inverted. So when you fold one edge up, they will both be facing the same direction.
When you make the credit card part, you take one piece of fabric and fold it per Darn Kat’s instructions. She gives measurements from the end of the fabric to point A, point A to point B, etcetera. For myself, I found that I preferred to make my measurements all from the end of the fabric. If you would like to do the same, here are the measurements for your folds, original format on top, my version below:
Anywho, I hope that helps. Again, it’s a superb pattern, and these are just my supplemental notes. =)
*Why the extra 1/4″ on the “Pieced Top”? - because to make it go nicely into nine, you would have to cut it insanely precisely to an insanely precise number. Something like 1 and 22/32nds “. So 1.75 pieces = happy sewing.
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Thanks Jules!
I cut out 9 strips of fabric one and onehalf inch wide and about 10 inches long. I planned to even up the edge to 8 and half when I was done sewing. I sewed each strip to the next one using 1/4 inch seams. When I finished, my piece was only 10 inches instead of 11.5 like instructions say. Mathmatically, I was correct. How do you get 11.5 out of those 9 strips if you sew them all together? Since I don’t expect my first wallet to be perfect, I’m just going to add two more strips to get the 11.5
Thank you Carolyn! I have made the updates. The above is now correct.