Tormented Soul with Sunflower Hat

My grandmother taught me about ghosts. She shared a story with all her grandkids that as a child she saw the ghost of her dead sister come through the bedroom window, float down the hall and into her crying mother's room. She could hear her mother talking as if being comforted and after that night her mother never cried about her lost child again.  Gramme had no doubt about spirit world and expected us all to believe, too.

As I was creating jewelry for the celebration of the Day of the Dead it occurred to me how ironic and sad it would be for a ghost to travel through eternity with a sunflower on its head forever reminded of an existence in which it could no longer participate. Some ghosts can be a sorrowful lot caught between one world and the next but the despair of one ghost carrying just a touch of a living thing, a constant reminder of its in-between state seemed a particularly miserable and unjust fate.

My imagination got the best of me so I had to create with polymer clay the image of this tormented soul, burdened with a length of chain each link representing a terrible misdeed from its previous life, forced to float through the netherworld constantly reminded of what it doesn't have.

Tormented Soul is a light weight pin about 4 inches long by 2 inches wide. The pin back is gold and is 1.5 inches long.