I’ve made six bifold wallets at this point. The first three were practice — the kind of thing you make for yourself and keep in a drawer because you know exactly where every mistake is. The last three are the ones I’d actually give someone.
The bifold is a good learning project because it’s genuinely useful, the dimensions are forgiving, and there are enough operations in it — skiving, edge beveling, saddle stitching, burnishing — that you’ll touch most of the fundamental skills before you’re done.
This post covers the stitching specifically, because that’s where I spent the most time figuring things out.
The Leather
Natural veg-tan, 2-3oz for the card slots, 3-4oz for the outer shell. I buy from Springfield Leather and Herman Oak when I can source it locally. The variation in thickness matters: too thick and the wallet is a brick, too thin and the card slots won’t hold their shape after the first week of use.
I cut everything with a straight edge and a rotary cutter. I tried a head knife for a while and found the rotary more consistent on straight lines. Head knife comes out for curved edges and corners.
Stitching: Polyester vs Linen
I started with waxed polyester. It’s the standard recommendation for beginners because it’s cheap, widely available, consistent, and forgiving. All of that is true.
The problem is what it looks like five years later. Polyester doesn’t patina. Leather does. A wallet that’s developed an honest patina looks beautiful, and the polyester thread running through it looks the same as it did when it was new — which is to say, slightly out of place. It doesn’t age with the leather.
Linen does. It takes on character. It also has a texture that grips the leather slightly differently than polyester — harder to describe, but you feel it in the stitch when you’re pulling tension.
The practical tradeoff: linen is less consistent, more susceptible to moisture, and requires more attention to thread preparation (waxing your own from a raw spool). It’s more work. I think it’s worth it.
Saddle Stitch Mechanics
Two needles, one thread. The stitch goes through both sides simultaneously — not like machine stitching, where a loop is formed. This is why saddle stitching holds when a thread breaks: each pass is locked by the cross of the previous one.
The variables that actually matter:
Thread length — I cut 2.5x the length of the stitching run. Less and you’re rejoining mid-seam. More and you’re managing an unwieldy tail.
Awl angle — I hold the awl at about 45° to the surface and push straight through in a single stroke. Wiggling creates an oval hole instead of a clean slot. Oval holes lead to sloppy stitches.
Tension — This is the thing. Both needles need to hit their respective sides of the leather with the same pull. Too much on one side and the thread cants to that side. Too little anywhere and the stitch sits proud instead of pulling flush. I ran probably 50 inches of practice stitch on scrap before my tension became consistent enough to trust on a finished piece.
Stitch spacing — I use a 4mm pricking iron for wallets. 3.5mm is finer and looks good but slows everything down significantly. 5mm starts to look agricultural.
Finishing
Edge beveling, then wet and burnish. I use a wooden slicker and beeswax. The burnishing takes longer than the stitching and makes a larger difference to the finished look than almost anything else. An unburnished edge looks amateurish no matter how good the stitch is.
The natural leather gets a light coat of Leather Honey and that’s it. No dye on this one — I want to see how it ages from bare natural.
Six months from now I’ll post a follow-up with photos of the patina development.