Size matters?

I have the hardest time making ornaments of a consistent size.  Intellectually, I know that if the cane is a certain size, the ornament will be a certain size.  But when it comes to making the canes...sometimes I reduce to far, and other times I can't bear to make the cane small enough.  It's a problem.  Or is it?

Here's the various sizes I've done over the last couple of months:

The one on the left is the largest...about five inches tall.  I added a couple of little touches--different hair ornaments, a fan, and an obidome (a little ornament on the sash).  Most of the Japanese ornaments I've done are between three and a half to four inches tall.  It seems to be the optimal size for a Christmas ornament.

The orange one is a little smaller, three inches.  There's a reason for that, but we'll save it for another post.  And finally, there's the one on the right.  It's about two inches tall and I made it that small on purpose...ta da!

Heh.  I took it up to show my mom.  She liked it and said, "Is it for me?"  Um...sure.  Really though, I never know quite what she will like, so I'm happy to give her something she admires.  I have a couple more Japanese Kimono beads...it will probably take a while to string them into necklaces--I have the hardest time winnowing down the beads to an acceptable amount.  We'll see....

Japanese angel ornaments...

Remember this one?


 I wasn't real thrilled with it, but I was showing it to the lady at the quilt museum, and she asked me to make 20.  They had an exhibition of Japanese quilts coming up and she thought they might be a good addition to the gift shop.  So I tweaked the idea a bit, and also tweaked the one I made for my mom a couple of years back:

And came up with an ornament that I liked quite a lot.  I'm getting ahead of myself, though.  I grabbed some canes I made over the last few months:

There were a few that were the right size, so I carefully (but not carefully enough, alas), cut a bunch of slices for the ornaments...and ta-da!  Japanese angel ornaments!

Well, it was a little more work than just ta-da! but I'm very happy with the way they turned out.  Here's a behind the scenes (no pun intended) look at the back of the ornaments (before the hair went on):

I delivered them to the quilt museum, and they seemed to like them.

Here's a couple of close-ups:

 

I've made a couple dozen more since then..various sizes and different types of detail.  I'll post pics over the next couple of days....

Moebius Angel Ornaments

 
I know I've been gone awhile.  A horrid combination of technical difficulties and too much work.  With the technical difficulties behind me (I hope!) and the weekend upon me, I thought I'd catch up a little.  The Quilt Museum sold all my Moebius angel Christmas ornaments (pictured above) and thought they'd like to carry them year round (yay!!).  So I spent a fair amount of time in April and May putting together a couple of dozen.  Here they are in progress at Clay Camp this year: