Building a better Mousetrap (wearable vessel art)

I've had an issue with the designs of the wearable vessels I've been experimenting with from the start. The original idea came from a project on the Sculpey site. It looked lovely, but the cord goes right up through the center of the bottle, which makes it pretty much useless for carrying anything in it. It's small, and not much could fit anyways but it's just the principle of the thing.

There's also an issue with the original lid not wanting to stay on the bottle. So I've tried various different methods to try and resolve the problem.

The latest was a hinge method, which works fine, but causes the bottle to flop a bit, rather than lay in a nice straight line down the chest. I like my end results to look polished and I'm just not getting that effect like I want.

So I sat down to try and design something a bit better. My sketch work is a mess, but I'm not trying to draw something pretty, just see if a design might work.

Here I played with the idea of using a pin to keep the lid on the bottle. I'm not really sure how well the pin would stay in, though I do like the oval shaped bottle for design. The problem with that is trying to get the mold out of the bottle later and there's also an issue with attaching the pin to the bottom, if it does work its way out then the whole bottom of the bottle could be lost.

Here I decided to go to a squarish shape and use a trapeze mount, similar to the idea behind my sculpture art pendants. I don't want to drill holes all over the piece, it's not really that thick, so I thought of using triangular strips of clay on the outside to trap the wire between them and the actual sides of the bottle. I also thought it would hang better if I attached it to a round tube for the necklace to run through. I'm thinking this last design might work well. 

With sculpting I can picture something in my mind and make it work, but with the more mechanical side of design I end up experimenting and, in my opinion, wasting clay on sub-standard designs. If I sit down and sketch I can usually see what the issues that I might encounter will be and hopefully build a better mousetrap as I work with it on paper.

Sue
www.adyinart.com