Holiday Creations Art Elements Blog Hop

About the time I learned the theme for this month’s Art Elements blog hop: Holiday Creations, I was planning to make a set of kitty cat themed ornaments for a tree for our aging cat.  We have a new glassed in front porch and thought it would be a perfect way to decorate it for the Holidays.  And for ceramic ornaments, it would be safe from the elements.

For the last few years we have been having an outdoor tree instead on one inside.  We have it out on the deck and decorate it with brightly colored netted bird treats.  It is so fun watching the birds flutter around the tree and peck at these “home baked” goodies of birdseed and peanut butter.  So this year we have 2 Christmas trees.
For our kitty cat tree, I used cat shaped cutters to cut out the decorations.

They seemed quite large at first but my clay shrinks about 11 % so they looked much better once they were bisque fired.
I used two methods to bring my cat decorations to life.  For some I silk screened on cat drawings (Mayco silkscreens) bisqued them and then added color

 and for others I did some drawing into the clay.  They dried really quickly so by the time I got to them to scratch  in some lines, the incisions were not very deep.  To improve them I used a black underglaze and then wiped it off, bisque fired them

and then hand painted on glazes and fired those to cone 5 ( above 2100 degrees F)

Finally I decorated the tree.  

 My kitty cat Christmas Tree

Our cat who inspired me

Thank you for joining me on this Art Elements blog hop today.  I had such fun making these ornaments and decorating the tree.  We enjoy it each time we step onto our porch.

The list of blog hop participants is below.  I hope you will visit all of them and enjoy their Holiday Creations.

AE team: