Mum's handmade nativities

This post is for my friend Irene, who asked me to write something about my mum's nativities.

She started a collection some years ago and now we have in our living room two cabinets like the one you can see in the photo aside.

Each shelf is full of different nativities: some she riceived from friends and relatives, some she bought (not only in Italy), some she made.

They are very different for materials and style. There are nativities made in glass, terracotta, plastic, metal, fabric, and even strange fruits I don't know. 

Some of them are painted (on a plate or on wood) or stitched on fabric. Mum even collected in a frame some stamps with rappresentations of nativities.

For the most part they have only three caracthers (the Virgin Mary, S. Joseph, Jesus), but some of them (like the one from Burkina Faso I showed you last week) have the other traditional figures (angels, sheeps, shepherds, the three wise men...). Some have a landscape, some not.

She experiments a lot with differents materials and projects to make original nativities. Today I want to show you three of them she realized in december.

African nativity (materials: painted clay, fabric, papier mâché bricks, recycled straw, plywood with roasted corn flour)

Frozen nativity (materials: recycled polystyrene, painted clay)

Nativity into ruins (materials: cortex she found in our garden, painted clay, straw, paper mache bricks, wood)

Consider they are tall at most 5 cm, so we can consider them miniatures, I suppose. I really like mum's skill: she is so accurate! Working with these small dimensions is difficult.

And I like also her propensity to use what she have in hands and recycled materials.

Last year she worked also on a big project: she painted eight stones, turning each of them in one of traditional nativity's carachters. I consider it her materpiece :)

Probably I'll show it to you in a second post.

Please, leave a comment and tell me what you think about these three works in the photos! I'll be very happy to know your opinions (mum doesn't read, don't worry)!