Today's LoveKins

Santa Ornament

I took some photos of one of last year's Santa ornaments that ended up at my daughter's house.  These ornaments were some of our most popular designs.  I know both Marge and myself wanted Christmas trees with these...I have some photos of a tree with our ornaments on the tree.  In fact the page background is one of the photos but neither one of us has enough to fill a tree.  Anyway here are more photos from my new cell phone.  I know I made these ornaments on a trip to Texas one year and Marge worked on them as well during trips to NY.  Who knew you could sculpt while riding in a car cross country???  

This santas hat is painted a winter blue.  Love the color!  

OOAK

OOAK??  Ok so it took me a bit to figure that out and start adding it to our designs.  OOAK stands for one of a kind.  Oh yeah, now I understand and thought maybe I should explain it to anyone who doesn't know.

This is a group of our early santas and snowmen.  I would like to have one of each!

Almost all our work is OOAK, made by hand without the use a mold.  We do produce more than one of certain designs but each one is still done by hand individually.  Sometimes they look close but no two are exactly the same because they really are ooak.  

Take this little santa, he stands about 7 inches tall and is similar in style to other santas we have sculpted.  However this little guy has a different interior, his base is aluminium foil bent and twisted and formed and then covered with a mache base.  The mache for this santa was from Jonni Good's recipe on the Ultimate Paper Mache.   I love the stuff, Marge not so much as me so for now we are using Jonni's recipe along with a commercial product called Celluclay.    When we started this way back in 1994, 1995 we used Celluclay exclusively.  However upon restarting our sculpting projects found the cost of Celluclay along with our bases to be extremely expensive.   I was excited when I found Jonni's website and all the different recipes for paper mash, paper mache.