Revontulet

Had this red bag (also free, from kierrätyskeskus) that needed some tlc:

There's nothing really wrong with it, except that the shoulder strap is almost worn through in one part, but the colour red, as much as I love all colours, has never been the colour for me, at least clothes/accesories wise, so I figured I might as well spruce it up somehow and maybe I'll end up actually using it some day!

So I used this sketch by my sister as an inspiration and got to it:

   

I toyed around with the idea of making it more square, 

and thought I'd build up the fox out of small rectangles:

So I sketched out this fox shape, cut it out...

...and scratched it on to the leather with a thin metal pen tip:

I then painted it a stipply white...

...and pondered how I would paint the rectangles, 

ditched the idea cos it would take too long and the rectangles I painted with the yellow paint 

(which is the only colour I initially planned to use) 

just didn't stick out enough for it to work. 

So, I did some more stippling, with the yellow, 

and then got carried away and included pink and turquoise as well

In hindsight, I shall name the other inspiration for this bag as revontulet, or northern lights in Finnish. Revontulet literally means fire of the fox and there's a Finnish tale about how they are created, 

and the stippling and all the colours are kind of aurora borealis meets fox, yes..?

Now I just need to figure out what to use for the strap... 

some kind of thin but durable white rope, perhaps...