Reviving PieceWork Drawings

 Way back 4 1/2 years ago when F and I first started our little business of recycling packaging materials into wallets and bags, I used to paint each new design and post it on our fledgling blog.  We had started with one design, a square wallet with an antique (i.e. used) button as a closure, and one material-- Kettle potato chip bags.  We spent a lot of time experimenting with other materials and troubleshooting our design.  Meanwhile friends started eating Kettle chips and saving the bags for us. Then someone left a bright blue Purina chicken feed bag on my doorstep, and our chicken wallets became very popular.  A few months after that, a friend's son asked us if we could design a wallet that would be better to sit on than our lumpy little square with the button (which we had thought of as a wallet that would live inside a bag).  And so our second design was born:  our Ultra Slim.  I painted it, and posted it to the blog.

Those original drawings were annotated, pointing out the features of the wallets.  I enjoyed doing them and actually kept it up through that first year.  At the end of the year we had 12 designs, and we made the  paintings into a calender, which we gave to our material suppliers as a thank you.  

But the next year business sped up, and I couldn't find the time to do all those paintings, so I gave up and started photographing the new designs.  Now here we are four years later and approximately 1200 wallets and things later, and I think it's time to bring back the paintings.  Above are paintings of 

one of our new wallets.  As many of our products are, this one was suggested by a friend.  She had seen a very similar wallet but made out of leather;  she preferred the light weight of our material and the fact that our material is recycled.  So we tweaked the design a bit and made it out of her favorite coffee bag  (coffee bags with their aluminum lining having proven to be a great material for our wallets).  The wallet, which we call the Vic, costs $23 and will be posted on our blog and ready for purchase very soon.  It has a card case on the front that you can access very quickly even with the wallet closed.  Inside there is a coin or extra card pocket that flaps up to disclose a billfold.  The whole thing folds into a compact 3 x 4.25 inches.  You can specify any color or theme that you like for the material;  as always, you can specify that it be made a different size and with a button instead of Velcro.  If you absolutely NEED this wallet NOW, email me at weRpiecework@gmail.com or comment here with your email address.

 The second wallet illustrated here is my personal favorite at the moment, and it, too, was requested by a customer who wanted a wallet even smaller than our smallest to date.  She didn't even want to bother with credit card slots.  So we designed this very sleek and minimalist billfold with a pocket inside for very small cards and two pockets for credit cards as well as a billfold.  It's great for carrying in your bag but also fits perfectly in a pocket for when you don't want to carry a bag.

We're selling this one, which we call the Virginia,  for $14 on line, which includes shipping, and a little less if you're local and we can meet up to hand off the wallet.  It will soon be on our blog, but in the meantime, you can comment here with your email address to order it or email us at weRpiecework@gmail.com.

By the way, these are drawings # 3766-3769, but I think I should be able to count them double since they took me a whole morning to do!