Nina Originals

While I don't decorate for the holidays anymore (no children at home, work, husband usually gone, etc), I did participate in a couple of ornament contests/exchanges this year. I like to make the ornaments, I just don't do a tree. Since the ornaments I made aren't really Christmas, I can hang them in my studio all year long. I took a seminar in October with Christi Friesen, and bought her giraffe bead pattern. The lion was done as a bead in an issue of Bead & Button magazine earlier. I used the ideas to create ornaments for my local polymer clay guild swap. Christi is very open and generous (and a very nice person) and encourages people to branch out and develop their own style/animals. I developed the zebra and gazelle using the basics learned from the giraffe instructions. The three animals are done on a very large glass ornament and were for an ornament contest at work. The antlers on the gazelle are actually beads that I found at the last bead convention I attended. I believe they are some type of shell bead. When I bought them, I wasn't really sure what I would do with them, I just knew they were cool. The final ornament is another one that I did for the guild swap, this one has an African-style mask, keeping with the jungle theme.