Altered Die Charm

The 2012 issue of handcrafted jewelry had a little section dedicated to pendants, earrings, and rings made from altered game pieces which fired up my imagination -- I'm thinking of a necklace with all sorts of charms and tokens.

First up was a die.  The article in question (by Candie Cooper) was for a pair of earrings made from altered dice with charms and beads.  I decided on just one die for a pendant, strung on a headpin rather than suspended between two brackets.  The first step was drilling a hole through the plastic  die, which was quite easy after I spent over two hours slowly drilling through sea glass and seashells for another project:

The next step was to color the die.  Cooper used alcohol inks to achieve a pretty, mottled effect, but I didn't have any and I wasn't inclined to buy some just for this.  Acrylic paints seemed too thick and likely to chip, so I headed to the internet, assuming there would be tons of inspiration and ideas for altered dice.  Only there wasn't any; surprising, given all the altered dominoes out there, not to mention other game piece jewelry.  Instead I found ideas on gaming boards, where people were looking to customize their D&D dice.  One woman said she had luck using Easter egg dye, and I just happened to have exactly that.  About 24 hours of sitting in pink dye resulted in this:

Now it was time to embellish each side. Rhinestones:

(A bit of extraneous crazy glue ended up dulling the sparkle of one; too bad.)

A paper flower:

A bit of dictionary page with a touch of gold solid oil paint:

(It still bothers me to cut up a book, even if it is a redundant, out-of-date dictionary.)

Gold paint on the remaining uncovered pips:

I sprayed it with fixative, and then strung it on a headpin with a few pretty beads:

As you can see, like an idiot I glued the dictionary fragment on its side.  Oh well.
My ideas for the rest of the necklace:
*An altered domino (a mini one so it doesn't overwhelm the rest)
*A scrabble tile with a metal bracket finding thingie, like the rings in the magazine
*Monopoly charms, especially the iron and thimble, from an old game set I found in the basement
*Clue charms, if I can get some
*Various arcade tokens
*metal jacks