How to Make a 4 card Gift Card Holder or Child's Wallet

So the other day I mentioned I was making my girls wallets, they are actually going to be for Christmas presents, but I like to work on things early in case I make mistakes!  Above is the first finished product!  This was also my trial wallet, I took the original idea from here  and modified it a bit to hold more cards and I added a Velcro tab closure.  I plan to make a few more hopefully this afternoon with the button closure like the original tutorial, but this first is for a 2year old and she'll do better with Velcro.  Okay, on to the tutorial, please keep in mind this is my first tutorial, so if you have questions feel free to ask and I will clarify!!!  I'm also not going to post every single step (I think I came close to posting all the steps though), but the original did a great job. My plan was to type up only my changes and I think that's what I mainly did!

Kids Wallet, Gift Card Holder

Materials:

• interior and exterior fabric cut to 6" by 5" (I used hello kitty for both these)
• 2 pieces of pocket fabric cut to 6" by 4"
• fusible interfacing cut to 6"by 5"
• tab fabric cut to 2 1/2" by 2" 
• 1 piece of Velcro cut to 1/2" by 3/4" (my Velcro was 3/4" wide so I just cut it 1/2" long)

 You can follow the original tutorial to begin your holder, fuse the interfacing to the exterior fabric, make the tops to the pockets just the same as she did just for two instead of one, but then stop before doing anything else!  

Making Tab Closure

To make a tab closure for your holder instead of using the hair tie options as the original you will take your tab fabric and first fold down just a tiny amount on one short end and iron it down.  I also stitched this small piece down, you don't have to and I feel like in the end it just added more thread showing on my tab since I didn't use a thread that blended in.  So it's up to you if you want to stitch it, it's not necessary I had chosen to in order to keep the end in place better while making the tab because I've found in the past sometimes the end wants to come out while ironing.

After I sewed the small end down I ironed the strip in half.

Then I ironed both long ends into the middle to meet the first line I made with my ironing, you can see the stitches I made on the short end on the left side still. (side note: I only stitched and folded in one short side because the other side will be stitched within the seams of the wallet)

Once you have both sides ironed into the middle you sandwich it closed so all the raw edges are in the middle and you have nice neat folded edges showing and iron it one more time!

Then simply stitch down the long and short side you folded in to close up your tab as close to the edge as your comfortable with, usually I would stitch both long sides, honestly not sure why I didn't notice I missed that until now.  You don't have to of course, but normally you would stitch up the open long edge across the open short edge and back down the other long edge even though it's closed it just gives your tab a more finished look.

I also attached the softer piece of Velcro to the closed end of the tab after I had sewn it shut at this point.  Just make sure you leave a little space at the end of the tab to grab the fabric so there's something to pull up on, if you look closely you can see I left a little edge of the short end then sewed the Velcro down.

I also took this time to measure out and place my Velcro on my exterior piece of the wallet, (my interfacing is already ironed on just like in original I did that first).  I measured 1/2" from the right hand side and measured 3" down from the top I sort of eyeballed centering the Velcro over where the 3" spot was (not pictured) and placed my Velcro  (make sure you position the Velcro with the 1/2" measurement going up and down)

Next because I wanted to make my holder have an extra pocket I laid the first pocket down on my interior fabric a half inch from the bottom and sewed a straight line just along the bottom edge.  I had done this pretty close to the edge of the pocket fabric and realized that once complete the card goes almost all the way behind the top of the pocket, so I would sew your line about a 1/4" from the bottom edge of the pocket fabric.

You can see  in the photo below the line is right along the bottom of the pocket fabric, this made my top row of gift cards only show a little above the top of the pocket, so definitely sew yours down about a 1/4" from the edge of the pocket fabric and that fixes the problem in the end.  (I tried this and posted more pictures of completed wallets at the end, but if you move the sewing line from the edge to the 1/4" away it's perfect) 

original sewing line is to low the cards won't be as visible when completed

sewing line should be at 1/4" from edge, note this is not to scale, but sew where black line is

 You also may have noticed I did a decorative stitch along the top of my pocket, I hardly use the decorative stitches on my machine and just decided to play around with it! If you choose to do this too I recommend you sew with the right side of the fabric facing up so that the stitches look their best.  When you iron down your folds for the top of the pocket it puts a crease in the front that is visible and gives you a sewing guideline to follow!

Now from here I starting following the other tutorial again. I just layered my bottom pocket on top of the pocket we sewed down and then layered the tab with the Velcro side down and a little bit hanging past the edge directly in the middle on the right side (pictured below) and then layered the exterior fabric face down on top of it all and pinned together to sew up the three sides just like she did.

Since we have an extra pocket once you've sewn up the 3 sides yours will look like this on the inside.

 This will be your outside with the Velcro and the tab showing.

Just like in the other tutorial I flipped my bottom pocket to make the wrong side showing and then stitched it across the bottom, so when you do this it will look just like the other one on the back where you just see the wrong side of the bottom pocket fabric.

Then flip it right side out and measure exactly down the middle, and you know what they say "measure twice cut once", well, in my case "measure twice sew once", because I almost sewed this up not evenly down the middle, oops!

 Once you've stitched down the middle you are done!!  You can now enjoy your handy work!

This is my completed card holder with some random cards in it and you can see how you can barely see the top two cards, but I think just moving your stitching line a little bit away from the edge will fix that no problem!

Exterior Opened

 

opened interior view

Bird Wallet and Cupcake Wallet

Inside of Bird Wallet (top) and Cupcake Wallet (bottom), you can see here that the cards on the top are more visible once you move the stitch line to 1/4".