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Large traditional crib of Wallonia manufactured by Robert Noirhomme. It includes 17 parts which form the base of a collection based on santons of Wallonia.

The production of a santon passes by many stages. Firstly, a clay ball is "squached” between the two parts of the mould and thus takes the shape of the character.
The ground character leaves thus fringed with a ground crown which it is necessary to remove with a small tool when the ground is still wet. Then, the edges too sharp are blurred with the special brush and the base is sandpapered.
In a furnace, santons will become terra cotta by a rise programmed on 3 levels to bring them to 1030° in approximately seven hours.
The final key is also the longest work: painting. Obviously this is also carried out hand-crafted because no machine can obtain a qualitative result. To make things easier, santons are painted with acrylic colors: watercolours which have the characteristic to hold with a washing necessary from time to time to revive the colors and to vacuum-clean.

The Christmas crib that you can see contains 17 characters: Marie and the child Jesus, Joseph, a shepherd holding a lamb in his arms, a wood fire, two sheep and a lamb, a dog, a duck, a goose, a cock and a hen, a pig, a goat, an ass, an ox as well as a cat.
The Jesus child is wrap up like a lombric. Thus like this stupid habit of the Belgian Ardennes wanted it to avoid diseases “later”! Robert Noirhomme wanted laid down, making her more human thus nearer to us. Rare are the representations of the virgin lying.
Joseph, in overall, makes himself useful while feeding the wood fire.
The old shepherd holds a lamb in his arms. He will be the first to offer one as a gift.

This basic box constitutes an original gift and makes it possible to begin a single collection from santons from Wallonia in Belgium.

The size of all the santons varies from 3 cm to 7.5 cm and they are all made out of clay.

Source: Robert Noirhomme, Belgian craftman.