True, it's almost Halloween. Also true is that everyone including me has fallen in love with the Twilight saga. Not everything involving teeth is about vampires, however. A few years ago, a former employer gave me a gallon-size bag of teeth. She thought they were from India and were either from cows or water buffalo. I quickly found that they were incredibly easy to drill, so I made many of them into beads and stitched some of them to my straw cowboy hat, which has since been crushed to the point that it's unwearable.
Lately I've been making things with feathers and artificial twigs. Real twigs dry out and break, so I avoid those. I remembered that I had piles of teeth sitting around, and so I made this hair clip.
It isn't morbid. I have many other bones and teeth that are my personal collection, not for jewelry use, stuff I've found in the yard or in the woods. Bones are eventually all that's left of living things for a very long time, and then even bones crumble to dust. They're a nice memento mori. Teeth make it possible for people and animals to live, and to put off the inevitable reduction to bones awhile longer. Teeth let us chew, let animals hunt, defend what is theirs. . . When we get close to teeth and bones, it can be a good start toward getting closer to our roots in the earth and the natural life cycle.
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