Christmas ornaments past and present

Hello Everyone,

I thought I'd post photos of the ornaments that I made for the Clayamies Ornament Exchange.

This first ornament is one that I made for last year's swap. The swap theme was whimsy. I made all of the canes and then put them onto the ornament.


The small black oval that you see in the middle is actually a piece of the Holiday Specs 3D glasses. These are pretty cool and they look like the image below. I simply cut out small pieces and put them into the ornament. Surprisingly they baked really well.



When you looked through the ornament at Christmas lights, you saw something like the image below.




This year's ornament used up a lot of my Santa cane that I made earlier. If you click on the photo you can see the detail of how I combined the Christmas carol stamp with the cane work.



For the back I used Lisa Pavelka's waterslide transfer paper. Overall I'm happy with the results but I did have a few problems with it. In some cases the water smeared the ink and I had to re-print the label or decide that it was close enough. In other cases there was a lot of bubbling after baking even though the piece went into the oven looking perfect. I think it might be due to the clay shrinking but not the transfer.


I have to admit that I didn't follow instructions exactly because I didn't cover the transfer with a bit of TLS before baking. I don't remember why I didn't do this but I think next time I would because I had a couple of cases where the label simply popped off after a couple of coats of Future floor polish.

I'll play with the transfers some more at some point.



And that's the posting for this week. Hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season.

Sandy