Canadian Mammal Pendants

My creative juices have been flowing at all time high speeds these days.  It may be that I didn't do much creating for the last two years or perhaps my amazingly organized craft room but regardless, it feels great to whip up some new things! The newest of my creations is a line of 1" necklaces featuring some awesome canadian mammals! Here's the most canadian of all the creatures - beaver!:

Isn't he darling on top of his little dam? And the animal cuteness doesn't stop there - check out a wide selection of other canadian furry creatures:

Yeah! You can use all your wildlife recognition skills for this picture right? Even with the two species of bears, deer, and squirrel? What fun! Ok. So I mislead you a bit with the mammal thing. Owls and gulls are indeed not mammals - but the majority of them are so I figure that counts. Plus that owl is trying to eat a mammal? Yup - a bit of a stretch but I'm sticking with it.  Boy do I ever love these. Heck - I even think the back of the pendants look cool:

I'm happy to report that these beauties are lead and nickel free with a nice coating of silver to avoid all your sensitive skin woes - and to top the whole thing off there is a generous long chain if you (like myself) dig the long pendant look:

Obviously these are easy enough to make shorter as well - but I feel the long chain sort of goes with the whole nature, free spirited thing. 

So how did I come up with the designs you may wonder? With a ridiculously enormous amount of work of course!  I started with rough images from a magnificent 1927 wildlife book from my Grandpa's farm and after a lot of high res scanning I did many (many) hours of digital drawing.  Once I got the little dudes to a nice spot, I added some colour blocking to the backgrounds and bam! Time to print, coat, cover, paint, and bezel up those images into their final homes inside those necklaces. Whew! It did end up being way more work than I originally thought it would but on the plus side I am mastering my photoshop skills and potentially peeking the interest of the masses to start studying wildlife biology of Canada! Hooray! Go science!

So what are your thoughts? Anyone out there brave enough to correctly identify all those lovely little creatures? Who is your favourite?