Gift - Terra's staff as a pen

A little birthday gift for Vixenkiba! I got rainbow cake in return

It's impossible to make a decent pic of this, you really need to turn it around to see how that wire wraps around it. Anyway, one of Vixen's characters wields a rather unusual-looking staff and I needed a birthday gift, so why not make the staff? Or better: a functional staff! Initially I used just an ordinary ballpoint pen fill, but the ink kinda escaped at one point and I didn't know if simply replacing it would stop that from happening, so I turned it into a dip pen instead. Much more awesome anyway. I used silk clay for this and iron wire for the... eh, wire. That wire was a bit too sturdy, it's hard to wrap it around the pen without destroying the clay (silk clay has a foamy feel to it, even when hardened, you can squish it). I painted everything with acrylics. The wire and some golden details have been painted with paint with a pearl-like finish, for instant shine.

You can't see it in the pics, but there is a piece of amethyst in the top of the staff. the amethyst is rather clear and thin, so you hardly see any purple (which is why I picked it). I wasn't sure if there was a stone in there until Vixen uploaded a drawing that clearly showed it and I was like 'crap, my mini-version doesn't have this!'. So I searched for some quartz crystals and my geological hammer - which is officially missing now, so I used a normal hammer (never hit rocks with normal hammers unless you are desperate!!!) - and smashed them to get a piece small enough to fit in there. All this pain and the camera refuses to pick it up... *sigh*

This was great fun. Makes me wish one of my own characters had a staff that could be turned into a pen (Rain's doesn't count. He has no staff, but a piece of tree).