Upcycled Leather Jacket No. 2: Dinosaur Edition

Last year I made a purse out of a leather jacket I found at a Goodwill.  It's pretty big, which is nice sometimes but lately I've been wanting a smaller purse to carry essentials in and not have to worry about stuff getting lost in an abyss. Naturally my first instinct was to go to Goodwill and find a leather jacket that I could use, and just my luck, I found exactly one leather jacket in the whole store. It was meant to be!

For this purse I ended up using one of the sleeves and the belt as the strap.

I decided I wanted a little bit of embellishment on this one, so I doodled a little dinosaur design and using a jewelers saw(for the first time) I proceeded to cut it out of some brass.

And here it is completed! I also ended up cutting some corner pieces out of some thinner brass to embellish the corners. I love how it turned out!

Here's a little peek of the inside. The purse has removable straps, a magnetic closure and a zippered pocket on the inside. I love how it turned out, and I can't wait to make a few more purses and whatnot from the rest of the jacket!

Rwar, Dino-Necklace!

Okay, well this little guy is actually a dimetrodon which makes him a pelycosaur rather than a dinosaur, but we can just pretend.  I've seen this idea before, stringing up little trinkets and toys to create new jewelry, and for some reason I decided I needed a dinosaur necklace.  I was quite surprised at how hard it was to find small dino toys, but eventually I found a big pack of them for 3 bucks so I snatched it up.  Most of the dinos in the package are too large for what I wanted to do, so I need to figure out what to do with them.  There were, however, about 4 or 5 guys in the package that would work just fine.

Here's the little guy I picked.

I used Krylon Fusion spray paint because it's supposed to bond to plastic and I wanted the best possible chance of the paint staying on and not flaking off on me as I wore it.  I suppose I could have just used some cheaper stuff but I didn't want to risk it.

Here he is, lookin' all shiny and new.

I have a tiny drill that I used to drill into the plastic to make way for the jewelry findings.  I actually messed up because the plastic is very thin on this guys fin so I ended up drilling right through.  That was fixed by a very generous glob of glue.

And finally strung up as a necklace.

This guy is pretty cute and I can't wait to wear it out!  Now I just have to figure out what to do with the remaining dinosaurs...