Handmade Zip Pouch in Southwest Banded Blanket Wool with Black Leather and a Silver-Tone Concho, c. 1990–2020

The Piece

A flat zip pouch that fits in a back pocket, built from two very different materials and better for it.

The face is a panel of heavy napped blanket wool in a banded Southwest pattern. It runs camel through cream, gold, tangerine and a deep scarlet, then back out through cream and orange, with olive arrowheads stepping across the wide bands at one end. The wool is thick and plush with a full raised nap, the kind of weight that comes off a blanket rather than off a shirt.

Across the zip edge runs a band of black leather, topstitched down and carrying the zipper, and the back of the pouch is a single unbroken panel of the same leather — smooth, matte, and quiet against all that colour.

Set into the middle of the leather band is a small concho: a domed silver-tone disc with a scalloped edge and a stamped sunburst radiating from the centre.

The pouch is machine sewn throughout and the edges are left raw and cut rather than bound.

History & Provenance

The concho is the piece of this with the deepest history, and the route it travelled is longer than most people assume.

The word comes from the Spanish concha — seashell — and the form of the ornament derives at least in part from Spanish horse-bridle decoration. Metalworking of this kind was first taken up by eastern nations, the Delaware and the Shawnee, who learned it from European artisans. After the removals of the 1830s carried them to Oklahoma, the craft passed to Plains peoples — the Comanche, the Kiowa and the Ute — and it was they who carried it south and west. Navajo silversmiths began making conchos in the 1870s and 1880s, having learned silverworking from Rio Grande Mexican smiths, and it is Navajo work that made the concho belt the object it is today.

So a stamped silver disc on a belt or a bag is four cultures deep before it is anything else: Spanish tack, eastern metalwork, a forced migration, and then eighty years of Southwestern silversmithing that turned a borrowed form into something entirely its own.

The banded stripe on the wool belongs to the same broad visual language — the wide-band, high-contrast blanket design that has been woven, traded and worn across the Southwest and the Plains for well over a century, and which has never gone out of production because it has never gone out of favour.

Now, plainly, what this particular object is and is not.

It is handmade rather than factory made, and the construction says so. The edges are raw cut with loose threads standing at both ends of the zipper, and there is no bound, folded or tucked terminal anywhere on it. Production goods finish their ends, because an unfinished end is a warranty claim. Somebody cut this from blanket cloth, faced it with leather, set a zipper and a concho into it, and sold it as it came off the machine.

It carries no label, no maker's mark, and no stamp on the concho. The pouch is offered unattributed, the concho is described as silver-tone rather than silver because nothing on it says otherwise, and it is not offered or represented as Native American made.

On the date: the materials are all current-production. A nylon coil zipper, supple chrome-tanned garment leather, and a blanket cloth whose nap is still full and unmatted with no fading through the reds. Nothing here is old, and the same pouch has been made from the same materials across a long span, so the range is given wide and honest at c. 1990–2020.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Small zip pouches are the least glamorous and most used thing anybody owns. This one takes cards and folded cash, coins, a key and a lip balm, earbuds and a charging cord, hair pins, a travel set of pills, or the loose small things that otherwise live at the bottom of a bag and are never findable.

What makes it worth carrying rather than merely useful is the wool. Blanket cloth in this weight has a depth of colour and a physical warmth that printed cotton cannot touch, and the banded stripe reads from across a table. It is the difference between reaching for something and being pleased to.

It works inside a larger bag as an organiser, in a coat pocket on its own, or on a dresser as the place car keys and loose change land at the end of the day. Flat enough for a back pocket, stiff enough to find by feel.

The palette also happens to be easy: camel, rust and scarlet against black leather sits with denim, waxed canvas, brown boots, turquoise and brass, and it looks correct in autumn without looking seasonal the rest of the year.

As a gift it is a good small one — a stocking filler, a groomsman's gift, a travel present — and it comes with a real story about where the ornament on the front came from.

A note on care, and wool is the part that needs it. Do not machine wash this and do not put it in a dryer. Wool felts and shrinks irreversibly in hot water and agitation, and the leather will stiffen, darken and crack if it is soaked. Spot clean the wool with a barely damp cloth and a little wool-safe soap, blot rather than rub, and let it air dry away from heat.

Moths are the real threat. This is untreated natural wool, and it is exactly what a clothes moth larva eats. If the pouch is going into a drawer for a season, put it somewhere sealed with cedar or lavender, and give it an airing and a shake every so often — moths lay in dark, still places that never get disturbed.

For the leather, a very light wipe with a soft cloth is usually enough; if it dries out, use a small amount of a neutral leather conditioner on the leather only, keeping it off the wool, where it will leave a permanent dark stain.

Trim the loose threads at the zipper ends flush with small scissors rather than pulling them, since pulling a raw edge unravels it. And do not overstuff it — the raw-cut edges are the weakest part of the construction, and strain is what opens them.