Tin Ornaments

The artistic processing of tin has a long tradition in Mexico and is one of the most typical representatives in the field of authentic mexican decoration. Mexican tin ornaments are an all-purpose classic and are enjoying worldwide popularity due to their vivid and dazzling blaze of colours.

Our opulent collection of christmas decoration offers a flamboyant mixture of birds and various other creatures, country-specific plants and wild life, christmas angels and other festive decorations as well as some exclusive own creations, all meant for those who like it colourful and a little bit trashy here and there.

In Mexico, many of these decorations are being used not only at christmas time, but year-round. Whether the tin ornaments serve as an extraordinary eyecatcher on the wall, floating on a thin fishing line under the ceiling, teaching pre-school kids the alphabet or adding them to your easter or dry-flower bouqet, you name it!

Our love and passion is especially showing in the tin ornaments that we created in-house: music making skeletons and mexican skulls. Try something new this christmas and use them to spice up your christmas decoration or create your very own Day of the Dead shrine at home with them.

Mexican tin ornaments are handmade

....and are coming from the very same small family business, like almost all of our products. Since the very beginning of our business, we have maintained a continuous and fair trade partnership with this family, who has been committed to this craft for generations.

Allow us to give you a little insight into the production of mexican tin ornaments:

At first, the outline of the ornament is transferred onto the tin plate by the use of a stencil and a simple thumbtack. Afterwards, each tin ornament is being indivually cut out with a metal shear and any sharp edges are removed. Finally, the typical tools of a traditional mexican metal workshop emerge. The look and, even more important, the sound of these significant tools, that’s what makes these workshops so distinctive and unique, and they can easily be seen and heard, even from a distance. A wide arsenal of custom-shaped chisels, driven by hammers, is used, in order to create the fine points and lines which form the design itself on the tin ornament. Countless hammer strokes are necessary to let the decor finally arise - a demanding activity for arms and ears, traditionally executed by the male members of the family.

The earlier described stencils have been handed down from generation to generation, for why they have a very high recoginition value with the particular manufacturing family. Therefore, they’re handled with a lot of caution and treated as almost sacred objects.

Material thickness is another characteristic to detect good quality. Cheap mexican tin ornaments are made of rather thin sheet metal and are monstly painted only on one side using fast fading colours.

This brings us to the last step in the manufacturing process of our mexican tin ornaments: the painting, which is, again for traditional reasons, performed by the hands of the female members of the family. They refine our christmas ornaments on both sides with high-quality lacquer coatings, whereas only some subtle nuances of the faces are left out on the rear side of some ornaments.

Since all of our tin ornaments are handcrafted with lots of love, we would like to point out that perfection, as in industrially manufactured ornaments, can not be expected and is nothing that we pursue at all. Minor deviations from the images in our webshop can occur and are giving each piece its particular charm.