Here's the cat pin/pendant finished. I used one of those pin backs that also has a bail on it.
Boy oh boy, did this little project take a long time. There are hours and hours of work in this thing -- and that's just the actual beading to say nothing about the time it took me to figure out how to do it. As I said earlier, it's a combination of embroidery and Peyote stitch. The outline of the cat was backstitched onto the backing. The face and a small portion of the body was embroidered directly onto the backing. Most of the body was done in Peyote stitch, and then zipped onto the edges of the cat. When all that was done, I put a double layer of very thin leather on the back. Then I added the edge beads and the final Picot edging. Finally, I sewed the pin back onto the leather and hung it from a funky ribbon.
Oh, yeah, the whiskers were added last and are kind of floppy, the way a real cat's whiskers are. Cat's eyes are green Swarvoski crystals and his nose is a single matt black triangle bead (except it kind of gets lost among all the other beads on his face.