Questions about card cases

[CurtisT]

I just recived my business cards and I want to make a case for them. I want to tool the outside so what size oz leather should use, how many card should fit inside, should I wet form the pockets, should I make pockets for two sides or just one? Any help would be appreciated!!

Curtis

[BillB]

Curtis,

I will try to help, but a lot of the question you ask you will have to answer for yourself. I have business cards in a leather folding card holder with two pockets, similar to a bi-fold wallet. The questions you ask on number of cards, two pockets versus one, and weight of leather all relate to how thick to you want this to be. Lets say you want to carry 25 cards in this card wallet. So take a stack of 25 cards and this begins to tell you the thickness you will end up with. Now add the thickness of the leather you want to use for the out shell and that would be on top and on the bottom of the stack. Now add to that the thickness of the leather or material you will use on the inside to make up the two pockets. I think you get the picture.

Now for the weight of the leather. You mentioned that you want to tool the case. So here are some things to consider. The thick the leather, the deeper the tooling can be. If you use thin or light weight leather you run the risk of cutting through and will have to add a leather liner to give stability and strength back to the case. If you go to thick or heavy weight, the case gets thicker. The lighter the weight leather, the simpler the carving needs to be or it should just be embossed (no cutting of the surface). If you do carving, then every cut line weakens the leather and actually reduces it weight from a strength point of view.

You did not mentioned if you were going to sew the case or lace the case, this should also be considered in your design.

YOu might want to consider buying a leather case and disassembling it. This will show you how it is constructed as well as giving you a pattern.

BillB