So I’ve found that if you take a thimble

and a fashion eyelet / grommet / whatever you want to call it

and drop it inside the thimble 

it looks like a stitchpunk optic.

This stemmed from me looking at a “make your own stitchpunk doll” tutorial that involved dropping a googly eye directly into a thimble partly filled with hot glue. I derped around with these fashion eyelets I had lying around and dropped one into a thimble to see how much it resembled an optic. And was surprised and pleased at the results. Even though I had to work it into place because the eyelet kept flipping over so it was upside-down. And then tilting the thimble so the opening was horizontally oriented would make the eyelet just plain fall out.

I then went on to put a small circle of light grey paper - wider than the hole in the grommet but smaller than the outermost rim so it would sit further back in the thimble - stolen black plastic circles from tiny googly eyes, glue, and made these. Using slightly smaller thimbles than the one in the above images. You can tell because the eyelet sits a little closer to the opening than in the other thimble.

Right now I don’t know what I’m going to do with them? I have a styrofoam egg that I carved holes into, to see how the thimble-optics would look on something shaped a little like a stitchpunk head, but I got the spacing wrong / the egg is a tiny bit too big and I have nothing to really sand it down to a better size with, that is if I can manage not to screw up in doing so if I manage to find anything to do the job with.