The leather itself is dark green on one side and black suede on the other. It's not a proper leather for period pieces, but it could be worse. It's approximately 2mm thick (4-5 oz) and a little stiff due to finishing on the green side.
Down the rat-hole I went. My dear husband reminded me that we had seen a distinctive little coin purse this summer when we visited the Museum of Bags and Purses in Amsterdam. A quick flip through Olaf Goubitz's Purses in Pieces found 3 other small bags that he described as wallets. From this, I decided to draw out the sizes of these wallets and attempt to estimate the size of the coin purse from our memories and the one tiny picture we got of it. Two of the wallets in Goubitz's book have tooling, which indicates the proper leather to use would be vegetable tanned. The book doesn't give any indication of leather thickness, but I'm guessing it should be slightly lighter weight than the leather I had to use.
After sketching things out as close to actual size as I could, I decided that I wanted any wallets I make to fit a modern credit card. I ended up slightly enlarging each of the wallets for this accommodation. One of the wallets from Purses in Pieces has a gusset, and our best guess is that the coin purse from the museum did as well. (the graph paper used is 4 squares to an inch)
Cutting was quite straight forward, although some of the well set wrinkles and folds in the leather tried to get the better of me. I was trilled to realize that I had just enough leather to attempt one wallet of each type.
Sewing was done by hand, but I used a modern black thread. The first one was sewn using an awl to poke holes, and then using a backstitch, but that was cumbersome. I switched to a saddle stitch for the remaining wallets.
All in all, it was about an hour of research and sketching, an hour of cutting and 5 hours of sewing.
The top left and bottom right wallets have gussets. The other two do not.
