Make his skin into the kings robe!
(too cruel? I would see it as an honour :3)
And his bones for a scepter and crown. Let his spirit guide the actions of the king.
If only you can assign multiple materials and construct your own custom items (though they would lack the artifact rating), then that scepter would be made out of his femur and skull, menacing with spikes of his fingers and toes, decorated with rings of his ribs. It may not be an artifact, bit sentimentally, it would be.
(Going off tangent for a moment here)
That SO has to become a feature; of course, with a pre-requisite of proficiency (the more skill above proficient, the more items that can be mixed and assigned at will) of the craft to be able to custom-make things. Kinda like how The Sims 2 required a minimum skill level to allow custom content to be painted/made. I mean, so far, workshops only work with the nearest neighbor method of assignment, and you can't choose exactly what you want used as easily; plus, so far, you can only make/decorate stuff out of one object/material at a time (again, in nearest neigbor format).
It could make for some interesting themeing of fortresses with less effort. Heck you could even save the theme formats if you want as well (IE- a series of obsidian/marble statues and doors and whatnot). Of course, doing this will not allow the Artifact rating to applied, and the higher quality rankings are harder to obtain, as well as they take much longer to produce apiece. At least then, value can't be cheated in by fake-making mega-facts. There are limits to what you can do/force, but you can still be creative. Custom furniture and whatnot becomes more of a privilege, even naming them yourself too.
...Sorry, just got another wild idea from reading a post/topic. Does it sound too "out there" by any chance? or would it actually be an interesting feature? It, of course, could be toggled from the init file whether you want the option active or not.