I just finished making this leather book cover for a friend's birthday. She loves Harry Potter so I was inspired by the Monster Book of Monsters.

Here's the link to the photo:


The leather is doubled and when I glued the layers together I scrunched up the top forehead area for dimension. The eyes I did by first taking a tiny triangle of scrap leather and rolling it up with double sided tape into a sort of cone. Then I hot glued the googly eyes to the flat bottom of the cone. Then I cut slits where I wanted the eyes to go and tucked the eyes in cone side first, securing it with leather glue.

I just finished this cat tree. My cats Love it! Especially once I rubbed it with catnip.

I didn't think to take many pictures of it during the process, but you can see 2 finished pics and 1 almost done which shows the tree before I finished gluing down all the carpet pieces.

I found some tutorials online which helped:

http://www.pandecats.com/x/building_a_cat_tree.htm
http://amby.com/cat_site/cattree.html
http://www.annelisabeth.com/oldsite/cat2.htm

otherwise I never would have known about Sono tube which is heavy duty cardboard used to pour concrete into. That's what I used for the 2 shelves and the bottom cubby hole.

I didn't follow the tutorials directions much, just used them as general guides. So it turned out the hardest part for me was attaching the large natural branch leg to the base. I turned the base upside down and screwed through the base and into the leg, but it was difficult to line up the leg that way. So when it was time to attach the sisal wrapped leg to the base, i first used an L shaped bracket from the top side. The bracket wouldn't be enough to hold that leg on it's own. But it was enough that I could then turn the whole tree upside down and screw the sisal leg on knowing it was lined up in the right spot.

I didn't have much luck finding cheap carpet scraps. So I ended up buying a piece at Home Depot which was sold precut and wrapped as Indoor/Outdoor carpetting for about $15. It is much thinner than regular carpet which turned out to be easier, I think, to hot glue to the Sono Tube.

Cat trees in stores are so expensive, so although my supplies cost me about $40, it was totally worth it. If I make another I'd like to build in somehow a little potholder for a plant. Has anyone seen something like that?