Another Pin There - Done That

I spotted these great Mad Hatter Ornaments from the blog Seeing Things on Pinterest. I made several and gave them to the gals at our holiday luncheon in December.

ELVES
I made elf ornaments last year for my coworkers for their Christmas presents. I'm just now getting them on my blog because unfortunately I thought I had moved the images from my camera to my computer before deleting them, but obviously hadn't. Luckily my Aunt took pictures of them and I was able to get the pictures from her. These are polymer clay over aluminum foil balls. I made two for each of my coworkers, as the both have two small children.

At work we have an annual ornament competition (mainly to decorate our department tree). This year we were each given a clear glass ornament and a prize was given to the most creative ornament. Originally I was going to do an elf face, but felt that wasn't creative enough. I came up with the idea of doing a naughty/nice ornament. I knew I wanted to have the naughty side sticking his tongue out, unfortunately due to the hair, you can't really see the expression on the eyebrow. One side is nice & one side is naughty. I had to do one face and then bake the ornament and then do the other face. The biggest challenge was to get the ears to look good from both sides - I'd sculpt one side & it would look good, but it would mash out the other side. Once he was baked, I had fun finishing him - the stocking cap is the top from a sock. His hair is a strip of rabbit fur. He was really fun to do - oh & I got first prize (a gift card, which I took to Michaels & got a great book on painting fairies, angels & mermaids in watercolors).

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.