Chas,
Your beautiful pencil holders brought back a memory from high school. It was the Yo-yo craze era. I worked in the auditorium (sound). This is the second largest auditorium west of the Mississippi river. It is big. It is tall.
OK so now we have two teen agers, one of whom has the master key to this huge auditorium. The friend decided to make a large Yo-yo. It looks to me that the diameter and thickness were about the same as your pencil holder. We used my geometry and figured how long a string we would need to go from the roof to the cement below. Well, we didn't want to dink the Yo-yo so we made the string so the bottom of the Yo was about two feet above the cement.
The guy got some good strong string. We wound it onto the Yo-yo. He put a Yo-yo loop around his finger and dropped it over the side of the building. When the Yo-yo hit the end of the string, it darn near amputated his middle finger. If he is still alive, I'll bet he remembers the time very well.
If you decide to make beautiful Yo-yos you might keep that incident in mind and make the Yo-yos smaller than the pencil holders.
By the way, your pencil holders are like a very beautiful woman who could stand to lose a few pounds.
Enjoy,
JimB
