1. 1
   

   Get an old bag to decorate! Or a new one, either way. :) I reused an old bag that was a favorite in middle school and high school. So fun to give the bag a new life!!

   
   
2. 2
   

   Find some tiny pieces of leather or anything to decorate your bag with. If you do not use leather or suede, you need to find stuff that does not fray if you don't want your bag to be a little hairy. I used all the stuff that could not be used for other stuff. Some had stickers or prints on it and other scraps were super tiny. Better to be used instead of being wasted, right???

   
   
3. 3
   

   First you need circles for the owl bag. You can use pinking shears to make a jagged edge around the leather, but I wanted a little bit less machine-made look.

   
   
4. 4
   

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   Making the owl (or any other animal) is a simple matter of geometry. Here are all the shapes you need for the eyes, eyebrows, and beak of the owl. I then cut little holes in the middle of the circles to makes sure that the button would fit snug into the circles. Then just start supergluing the leather to the bag. I used an amazing glue- it was the E6000.

   
   
5. 5
   

   Once you have the eyes and face glued into place with superglue, then you need to cut out the scales for the belly of the owl. This is where the tiny scraps came in super handy. I barely threw away ANYTHING. It was great.

   
   
6. 6
   

   To make the scales into a line, you need to sew them together at the top and it will make it much easier to sew the scales into place on the owl belly.

   
   
7. 7
   

   Once you have the strips sewn together, simply hand-stitch the lines into place.

   
   
8. 8
   

   So once you have all the main parts of the owl in place, you can add other patches to balance out the bird. I added small pieces of suede to make the bag look more detailed. Then I did the blanket stitch around the suede pieces to add more feathery looking details. Here is a link to a youtube video on how to do the blanket stitch. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJht13Bcw-U

   
   
9. 9
   

   I still need to add some little feet, but I am very pleased with the final project! Be sure to check out more about this bag and the original Kate Spade bag on my blog

   
   

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