Cheating the Well of Nonbeing

My first work with silver in quite a while began yesterday, as I decided to use some old failed pieces of silverwork that came to me from flea market leftovers.  The ring shank was a nice, solid half dome sterling wire, with a battered, unsuccessful split at the top, most likely meant to hold a bezel.  I opened that, trimmed it, and spring fit four prongs to a silver salt shaker lid, intending to rivet an ancient carnelian bead inside.  After an hour of dinking around with tiny rivet components, they of course rolled off my bench and into the Well of Nonbeing on my floor.  I did find one, and decided to proceed without the rest.  Setting the rivet resulted in another trip into the Well of Nonbeing; the whole thing was not happy with its parts and it failed to come together, preferring to fly apart and separate into the Well.  After a few monosyllabic remarks, I began looking for a solution.  That's when the magic happened -- an old mirrored glass sugar button with a broken shank begged to be tried in the shaker lid, and it fit like pure destiny, with just the right amount of silver above the edge to burnish over it and set it like a precious stone.  Happy, happy, happy.  This is so sweet; the button loves the shaker lid and vice versa -- they tell a story the dear old bead could not have told.

So, Well of Nonbeing, 0, Maker, 1.  I win (this time).