This and That

Every year, when I finish my ornaments, I leave out the Sculpey, hoping to be inspired to make something more.  Generally, it just sits in the corner of the living room, adding to the clutter and gathering dust.  This year, amazingly, I pulled together a few magnets.

Our bird feeders have been very popular with the local birds this season.  We don't have bluebirds, but I was watching feeder activity when I made the birdhouse magnet.  The bear is an old standby of mine.  My very first ornaments, when I started working with salt dough (decades ago!), were teddy bears that looked very much like this.  

The pile of apples will go to a friend of mine who picks tons of apples each year and makes lots of applesauce.  Delicious!  I still have a jar or two from this year's batch.

The pig and the veggies were repair work on older pieces.  The poor piggy needed a new tail and its left ear reattached.  The veggies had been dropped numerous times, and had lost most of the carrot greens, both squash and a number of mushroom tops.  That ended up being a lot of work to repair, since the new clay wouldn't stick to the cured clay.  I couldn't repair the carrots themselves, since I couldn't match the color.  Regardless, it looks a lot better than it did!  And everything stuck once it was baked.

I also worked on a new name tag.  This one has a pin embedded in the back of it that was baked into the name tag.  So, short of the whole name tag cracking, it should never come apart.  The last name tag I made uses magnets to hold it in place.  Magnet name tags look better on clothing (they don't pull the fabric like pins), but aren't totally foolproof.  In the last year my name tag has fallen off once or twice, but only when I got really jostled while dancing.  Luckily it has not taken any damage; not even a single flower has been chipped!  I'm sure this name tag will fare as well.