You can't imagine anything more ghastly? How about this?
Instead of exchanging rings, the loving couple bit off the tips of each other's ring fingers and planned to make necklaces from the bones. ("I’m not dating a ring, and I don’t want a ring. I’m dating flesh, and I want flesh to make a commitment to me.") Story accompanied by graphic photos!
Is it a hoax? Here's a hint: look at the URL for the publishing date.

The link above appears not to work. Here's the URL:
http://www.bmezine.com/news/pubring/20050401.html

Could you hear my forehead slap all the way in NYC? We soooo missed the boat last week! As you may recall, my son (your nephew), had a piece of his skull removed following a wakeboarding accident last Wednesday. If only we’d saved it! We could have fashioned a pair of dice or some wine glass charms!

It does bring new meaning to "Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh."

*shiver*

And I thought using our mother's melted down anniversary bands was unique...

Clive,
Frankly I'm a little amazed that you, enthusiast of Meatbot Massacre and (alleged) champion of many FPS games claims this is "ghastly".
I dunno, maybe I'm just playing devils advocate here, but I'd be very surprised if neither you, nor the home you grew up in has some sort of ivory jewellery or decoration. My parents aren't fancy-pants, but I'm certain if I rummaged through their stuff long enough I'd find a pendent or tie clip made from bone.
So here's the deal - why is it that two consenting couples who have chosen to grow bone in a lab, without harming themselves or others is ghastly, while (unconsenting) animals killed for their bones is business as usual?
Not trying to get all PETA on your ass by any means, I can feel where you're coming from a bit, but hell, I'm on board with Chris L (even if he is being fully sarcastic). I think it would be hilarious to take it a step further even.
Personally, I'd want a bone bowling ball - perhaps even with a skull tastefully etched in it somewhere... Tell me THAT wouldn't be intimidating at the lanes.

Tissue engineering of bone is one of my areas of research, and I've been following this for a while. It's not a hoax; the art school people are collaborating with a well-known research group in orthopaedic tissue engineering at King's College London. The problem is that they just can't do it yet. The wedding ring in the picture is a model made from cow bone (look at the text under these pictures ; the irregular ring is a cross-section of shaft of a cow bone). They're documenting the various steps they'd need, except the one that nobody can actually do yet: growing the cells on the scaffold in a way that results in a solid chunk of bone.

At this point, nobody can grow bone tissue in vitro that comes even close to having the properties of natural bone (to replace bone that is weakened or fractured in patients with osteoporosis, for example). The biojewelry people have an advantage, though, in that the bone they produce doesn't have to live up to the stringent mechanical and biological constraints of tissue that is grown to be implanted in the body.

But ghastly? I think that's overstating it a bit. I mean, people save their kids' baby teeth - it's really not that different.

You think that's ghastly? Have you seen this:

http://www.lifegem.com/

Take the ashes of your loved one and turn them into a diamond. Oh, pets are included too.

What better way to honor your loved ones by turning them into a fashion accessory?

Garth, you are quite right that I am a connoisseur of gore-splattering video games! But hey: There's fantasy, and there's reality; it's one thing for me to rip out my opponent's spine during an old-skool round of Mortal Kombat, and it's quite another to present my bride with a bloody, freshly-severed spine as a token of my affection, heh. (Though I dunno ... if somebody actually used an entire spine as a wedding token, that would be so totally over the top that it might wormhole out into a new dimension where even I would be kind of impressed.

BTW, I agree: A bowling ball made of my own bone would rock with undescribable force. And the PETA argument is, in fact, morally consistent; there is no consistency in my positions other that the "ick" factor.

Chris, yes, you totally should have saved some of Adam's skull and made, I dunno, knife handles out of it! (Chris L is, by the way, my sister!)

Debcha, you're right, people do regularly save baby teeth ... but when you think about it, isn't that kinda creepy too? Then again, I'm in the process of designing a backlight wall-decoration that consists of a light shining through the full-chest X-ray the US government forced me to take -- to check for TB -- when I immigrated to the US. So I should probably not be holding forth on aesthetically creepy adornments ...

Steve, yeah, I've seen lifegems! For some reason -- possibly because the resulting diamond product is so utterly different from flesh and blood -- it didn't freak me out as much as the bone rings.

I am clearly a Freudian/Jungian case study just waiting to be analyzed.

i think this may be the "dead bits of a still living organism" ick factor, to be precise. Let's test this theory. Lots of people eat lamb, right? I live in the sheep farming part of Spain. A local delicacy here is lamb's tail stew. Lambs' tails get very fat and divert nutrition from the rest of the lamb. So when lambs are born, or shortly after, a ring is put round their tails which stops them growing and in a few days makes them drop off. But it would be a shame to waste all that good lamb meat, so... I cannot bring myself to go near this dish.

One of the coolest objects I've ever held was a necklace made of beads in the shape of human skulls... I think most people have seen beads like this, usually carved out of cow bone. Thing is, the necklace I was holding was little human skulls craved from the skulls of tibetan yogis. No shit. Maybe it was my imagination, maybe not, but when I picked that thing up it was like being plugged into house current (which I've done, thanks to an improperly grounded electric guitar).

If it hadn't been 1000's of dollars, I probably would have bought the thing. I also had a friend at one time who tried to put a clause in his will that all the long bones in his body were to be made into flutes...

But of course, none of the above referenced uses of bone were meant to be executed before the persons died.

I kind of like the idea of the bone wedding band...

Laurel, *man* that sounds like a gross dish. I do like lamb, too, but: Ew.

For some reason, John, the idea of a flute made out of human bone sounds kind of cool. I don't know why the idea of wedding bands seems so comparably freaky to me. Maybe it's that the people are still alive?

But if it's the still alive-thing, wouldn't eating, say, cheese also be gross? Not to mention egg? And what about those pastoralists who use the blood of their cows and goats but don't kill them? Oh, wait, that IS gross.

Ahahaha!

As far as the still-alive thing goes -- cheeese is sorta natural, insofar as the cow or goat or whatever produces milk on its own. You don't need to surgically extract the milk.

Then again, a lot of people find cheese pretty gross anyway.