It's not going to take forever, Hally!

My youngest sister was born when I was 16.  We didn't share much in our childhoods, but we live in the same city now and I have had the chance to spend more time with her over the past few years. Hally is really creative and has an amazing ability to see beauty in what most people consider to be ordinary. 

When Hally is with us, she and Ben pal around quite a bit.  His endless energy seems charming to her long after others are ready for a break.  A few weeks ago she gave Ben a video she had put together of him during a visit at my parents' house, and it was nothing short of amazing.  She truly has a talent for editing, audio, timing, angles...whatever else goes into making a video clip really "work". 

Hally came over to visit one evening several months ago with this bag for me:

Yes, that's what was really in the bag, and she was hoping I could make her a pair of earrings.  Out of her teeth.  I was thinking a pendant with resin to suspend them, and she said that would be ok, but I could tell she was really hoping for earrings.  At the time, it was cold and I wasn't able to get to my workbench in the garage much.  I put the bag aside to wait for warmer weather and inspiration about how to handle a pair of tooth earrings.

Last weekend, I opened the bag to see what I really had to work with. 

I wanted the end result to be a pair of earrings that just looked like...ordinary earrings.  Until you got closer.  I used the dapping block to dome two silver discs and drilled a center hole through each, then used sterling wire to wrap the teeth and extend through the top of the silver discs.  For stability, I put a small dab of E6000 on the wire at the top and the bottom of the tooth.  It dries clear and is flexible, so I'm hoping it can absorb any shock and help keep the teeth inside the wire cage.  The discs sort of spin, so it's very hard to get a good picture of them.  Maybe Hally can give me one that she takes--she's much better at that than I am. 

In one part of the video that Hally gave Ben, he is coloring a giant picture on an easel and Hally can be heard off screen saying something about how it will take forever.  Ben responds, "it's not going to take forever, Hally!"  She probably wondered if it was going to take me forever to make those earrings, too...