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[bob ford <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>]

>From the WSJ :  There is  a slideshow at the link

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 When the Turkey's Gone, Some People Are Thankful for What's Left 'Bone Lady' 
Finds Muse in Skeletal Remains, Turning Them Into Earrings, Necklaces, Toys

By ROBERT TOMSHO

 more in US »BANGOR, Pa. -- Although the Thanksgiving turkey may arrive at 
the holiday table as a culinary king, it leaves as a gristly carcass that 
some cooks can't wait to ditch.

Janet Haddad wouldn't dream of it. Through the years, the high-school teacher 
has saved dozens of discarded birds from the dump.

Turning Leftovers Into Art


Rob Tomsho/The Wall Street Journal

A toy Mrs. Haddad made out of a turkey sternum

Known locally as "The Bone Lady," she spends the rest of the year taking them 
apart and cleaning the individual bones. Then, she turns them into toys, 
jewelry and decorations. With a little paint, vertebrae become place-card 
holders. Dyed neck bones adorned with tiny plastic eyes are transformed into 
quirky dragonlike creatures.

"Most people have the turkey to eat, and that's it," says Mrs. Haddad, a 
51-year-old with spiky blonde hair. "When I sit down to Thanksgiving dinner, 
I see so much more."

In the days after the feast, her freezer inevitably gets stuffed, albeit not 
with leftover white meat.

Knowing of Mrs. Haddad's work, friends and family in this rural area north of 
Allentown, Pa., bring her the turkey carcasses from their own tables, along 
with the bones of assorted other dead animals found in the woods or by the 
roadside. When the weather is cold, they leave the goodies in garbage bags on 
the front porch.

"I bring it over just as it is," says Judy Romagnoli, a neighbor who has been 
giving Mrs. Haddad carcasses for years.

No one knows how many artisans like Mrs. Haddad search Thanksgiving remains 
for such treasure. Some turkey-bone aficionados are hesitant to advertise 
their endeavors, fearing others will think the whole idea gross.

Sharon Hauser, a retired medical technologist from San Jose, Calif., got a 
little taste of that last December when she posted a picture of a holiday 
ornament she'd made on Instructables.com, a how-to Web site. "No offense," 
one viewer responded, "but who would hang turkey vertebrae from a Christmas 
tree?"

Is It Art?
Eugene von Bruenchenhein, now relatively famous as turkey-bone artists go, 
didn't get much respect or notice during his lifetime. The eccentric 
Milwaukeean used turkey and chicken bones to create intricate miniature 
towers and elaborate little thrones.

 The Bone Lady's Handicraft
2:18
Janet Haddad, also known as the "Bone Lady," makes jewelry, toys and other 
crafts out of the dead carcasses of deer, groundhogs and other animals. Her 
preferred species? The turkey. (Nov. 25)
Museums and galleries didn't begin buying Mr. von Bruenchenhein's work until 
after his death in 1983. These days, the thrones are estimated to be worth up 
to $10,000 each, and the towers -- if you can find one -- as much as $70,000, 
according to Carl Hammer, a Chicago gallery owner that has sold some of the 
pieces.

Working with turkey bones has its pitfalls. To remove old tissue, they must 
be boiled, scraped and left to dry, often for months. When Tom Roseman, of 
Massillon, Ohio, first started making his "turkey leg angels," he got a 
little too eager. "I tried to jump right into it," the fast-food cook says. 
"They got all moldy."

Four years ago, Shelly Johnson of Salt Lake City boiled up a batch of bones 
in honor of her mother who, before her death in 2001, sold turkey-bone crafts 
at church fund-raisers. Mrs. Johnson fashioned brooches from turkey vertebrae 
for all the women in her direct family. The men got tie tacks fashioned from 
Cornish-hen bones. Painted gold and festooned with green eyes and red flannel 
tongues, both looked like tiny dragon heads.

Mrs. Johnson says not everyone was thrilled with the gifts. But the effort 
gave her a sense of peace. "I did the boiling just like mom did," she says.

Always fascinated with skeletons, Mrs. Haddad, the Pennsylvanian, began 
dragging home roadkill and asking her parents to save turkey carcasses when 
she was a teenager. But her reputation as a connoisseur of animal bones 
didn't really take off until she and her husband, Allen, bought a farm 
outside Bangor in 1981.

Mr. Haddad thinks a turning point was the passing a few years later of one of 
their pigs, which dropped dead after apparently eating part of a poisoned 
rat. With his wife out of town, Mr. Haddad hauled the porcine stiff to a 
remote area in the woods behind the family's home. When he went back many 
months later, nature had taken its course.

After he mentioned the skeleton's impressive bone structure to his wife in 
passing, she promptly hiked to the site and began taking it apart, bone by 
bone.

Creeped Out
"At first, I thought it was creepy," Mr. Haddad says. "But you get used to 
the things that Jan does."

But not, it seems, without some help. So that Mr. Haddad doesn't get 
surprised while searching for frozen soup or vegetables, he insists that his 
wife label her bagged carcasses before putting them in the freezer.

>From pigs, Mrs. Haddad diversified into deer, groundhogs, rats and snapping 
>turtles. But most of all, she fell in love with turkeys, which the family 
>also began raising on their farm.

With 3,500 feathers and 200 bones, the typical turkey is a veritable 
cornucopia of raw material and inspiration. "When I look at turkey bones, I 
see so many little creatures," she says. "My imagination just runs rampant."

 
Janet Haddad
To clean her bones and carcasses, Mrs. Haddad brings them into the nearby 
woods. There, in a heavy cauldron nearly as big as a garbage can, she boils 
them for hours in water, bleach and lye. Afterwards, she leaves the bones 
outside to sun for months in large pans covered with wire mesh (to fend off 
the local turkey vultures).

Some bones are left as is and used for the assemblies Mrs. Haddad puts on at 
schools about animals. Others go to the converted barn that serves as her 
workshop. Some are dyed, cut or sliced to make the earrings and necklaces 
that she sells at craft shows. Others are painted and become toy monsters and 
dinosaurs.

Most finished goods sell for less than $20, but Mrs. Haddad gets up to three 
times as much for one item that features a skeletal mouse caught in a trap.

Wine and Bones
One recent afternoon, a stream of customers came by her home to sip wine in 
the sunroom and pick up items they'd ordered for the holidays. Katie Tuerff, 
one of the visitors, says she thought Mrs. Haddad's work was too weird when 
she first heard about it a few years ago. But today she's come to buy 
turkey-bone toys for her two young daughters and earrings for herself.

"I like funky jewelry," she said.

Across the room, Mrs. Haddad was showing some visitors a pair of earrings 
made from slender turkey bones that were sharp as toothpicks. "I take them 
off at Thanksgiving and, if I'm out somewhere, I'll stick an hors d'oeuvre 
and eat it," she told them. "It starts instant conversation."

Later, while Mrs. Haddad was in her workshop plucking feathers from a 
weathered wild-turkey carcass, Dennis Horn, a family friend, came up the 
driveway toting a plastic bag containing several deer skeletons he'd stumbled 
across while hunting. "They're gorgeous," Mrs. Haddad said, cradling one 
foul-smelling ribcage in her hands. "You've made me a happy woman today."

Given all the joy and contentment that bones have already brought to Mrs. 
Haddad, she has sometimes kidded with her husband about something else that 
would make her happy.

"I think I would be most proud," she says, "if people would make something 
from me after I'm gone."


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122765597035358073.html