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  • From: bob ford <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Homestead] Turkey Bones - Art
  • Date: Thu, 27 Nov 2008 09:26:38 -0800 (PST)

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

----------------------------------------------------------------------

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






  • [Homestead] Turkey Bones - Art, bob ford, 11/27/2008

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