#yad

The shafts are made with baked and sealed polymer clay. The hands are also baked polymer clay, but they've been electroformed to encase them in about a millimeter of copper, which I then polished and sealed.

These two are my dad's:

And this is my stepmom's (note how they have a matching set):

I carved a leafy vine twining up the shaft from the hand (the Torah is a tree of life for those who grasp it etc etc), and then electroformed copper onto the vine, and sealed it in with E6000 jewelry glue so it wouldn't flake. Note that this yad is left-handed, just like my stepmother. There are very few left-handed yadaim out there (I checked and it seems halakhically okay), so I felt it would be meaningful to her to have a yad that felt like a true extension of her own hand (I was right).

Close-up of the wood-like texture on my dad's larger maroon yad:

Close-ups of the hand that went into the left-handed yad: