Hand-carved wooden Christmas elf ornament

For the past four years my brothers, sisters, and I have been doing a gift-exchange for Christmas where each of our families hand-make a gift for another one, and we cycle through the order. This year I made a gift for my oldest sister's family. When we first started the exchange I came up with the idea of carving an ornament out of wood, and I've now done that each year. This year I decided to go with a Christmas elf. I don't really have any carving experience other than these once-a-year projects, but I think it turned out well. I used a large pocketknife, a small pocketknife, some needle files, and sandpaper. I started by drawing a picture to guide my cuts.

In previous years I carved the piece at the end of the piece of wood but I found that it made it easy to hold in one direction but hard to get a grip on in the other, so this year I decided to leave a gap at the top and then carve the piece from the middle to see if that made things easier since I would have a "handle" on either end, and I think it did.

The original drawing called for thinner limbs, some areas that would require cuts through the figure, and sharper features, but as I was carving I realized some of those choices were a bit impractical, at least at my skill level. Also, whenever I had to carve the parts of the wood that would end up removing the drawings I would tend to get a bit nervous, since I was using them as guides for where to carve.

Before I got done with the final details I was a bit nervous about how it would read, for a while I couldn't stop seeing the resemblance to a pig with the face, but I think that just stuck in my mind from when I left a round circular area in the face to be carved away later.

I wanted the ornament to be able to be hung if they wanted, so I decided to leave a "block" at the top of the hat that could support a loop, and I hoped it would read as something structural in the wood rather than a weird feature of the hat. I have a lot of tendencies toward perfectionism, but on balance I'm satisfied with how it turned out, and my sister and her family say they liked it, and that's the important thing.

I made a small turntable and took a video of it spinning so I could show it from 360 degrees (btw, you can set a youtube video to infinitely loop with the right-click context menu).