Facelift for a Classic Souvenir

We picked up this little fellow at a yard sale the other day. You may have seen these minimally processed dried pufferfish in sea shell stores at various ocean vacation locales. Typically, they are stuffed with cotton and finished with googly eyes, a string to hang them from, and/or a little straw hat. Come to think of it, I may have some left over from childhood lurking around my folks' house....

 This was a simple notion that sprung into my head several months ago. I was hoping to buy one of these dried puffers over the summer, but unexpectedly stumbled upon this guy instead. The idea is just to give him a "face lift" or change of expression by replacing the standard googly eyes with high quality glass fish eyes from the taxidermy supplier.

The first step was to clean him up with a damp paper towel. You can see how dusty he was in the first picture. Cotton was also spilling out of his mouth and had to be poked back down into his gullet. His tail fin had several tears in it and I was contemplating soaking the tail and trying to repair it, but decided to just leave it as is. Without knowing how the dead fish was preserved, I couldn't estimate how well it would tolerate full rehydration and clearly I didn't want to risk causing the piece to rot...

I carefully pried off the original eyes using a dull scalpel blade. Next, I tried out various pairs of glass eyes that had been ordered from a taxidermy supplier.  Several weeks beforehand I selected a dozen pairs of fish, reptile, and novelty eyes just to have around the house for when Inspiration hit.


In the end I chose 10mm alligator eyes because of their soft, green hue and slightly evil gaze. They were about 4mm larger than his googlies, and at first gave him a really bugged out appearance. It was obviously to me that they needed sockets, which I delicately cut out. All said & done, the whole craft took about half an hour and the results were quite impressive, in my opinion. His name is now Lord Puffington V.

A Surprise Taxidermy Pick!

This weekend my boyfriend surprised me with a visit to pick his coworker's father's garage for vintage taxidermy pieces and parts. The man had been an avid deer hunter & antler collector. He had dozens of beautiful antler sheds, mounted antlers, and unfinished wooden mounting panels he'd made during his younger years. He had some rather deteriorated 1960s era whitetail and pronghorn neck mounts and we decided to adopt the whitetails. One has a crumbling apart nose, but the other is in decent shape and we were able to dust him off, polish his eyes and antlers, and display him in the living room.

The generous man who allowed us access to the items was very thankful to pass on his father's belonging to others who would clean them up and display them for the next generation. We spent a good portion of the afternoon touring the old house and listening to the histories of our 'new' treasures. If you've ever seen the TV show American Pickers and heard the property owners' nostalgic tales of the items for sale, it was exactly like that. We left feeling proud to help the man out and give a new purpose to his father's collection. I left with the hoard shown below, and with big ideas for how respectfully incorporate it into my artwork and theoretical craft fair booth.

Drafting

Based on a sketch from 2011!!

 I'd been hoping to make a better, more finalized version from the outset....You ever, as a kid, pick up a hamster at a pet store or a friend's house, finding it ridiculously adorable -- minus the giant, bulbus testicles? In honor of pet rodents everywhere, I present thee: 

Humble Beginnings

As a child I was always fascinated by the macabre. My first encounter with taxidermy was in a bait & tackle shop with my dad. I don't recall exactly how old I was, but we'd walk into this shop and right in the entryway was a gorgeous stuffed mountain goat. He appeared to be strolling in, right along with the customers.You could dig your fingers into his thick fur, touch his knobby horns, or stare into his lifelike glass eyes. The store also had a full mount snarling brown bear, deer and moose heads and dozens of fish. But the trotting, friendly, white goat was my favorite.

My parents would take my younger brother and I to the Harvard Museum of Natural History  where I'd spend hours walking the collections of stuffed mammals, birds, insects, and ocean creatures. It was so impressive to see the exotic menagerie, but I wanted to know how They did it. "How does one stuff an entire tiger?" My 8 year old self vowed to find out...

20 years later & I'm in a good place. Stable income and a loving boyfriend who supports and even contributes to my strange hobbies.  He is an avid hunter (I've gone on a few expeditions as well) and has a chest freezer with several deer hides he wants to learn to tan and make into clothing. Thus, over the last few years I've been doing a good deal of self-directed online research into preserving hides and taxidermy techniques.

There are many steps involved in processing even a small animal hide. After slowly and carefully removing the skin from the body it must be salted, scraped or fleshed out, pickled in an acid bath, fleshed again, briefly re-pickled, neutralized, dried, tanned with more chemicals, rinsed, dried and worked in a manner that breaks the skin's protein structure to produce a soft, cloth-like material. And that's JUST for a flat pelt.  Molding and mounting the pelt over a pre-made animal form to create a "stuffed" taxidermy piece is another skill set entirely. So, suffice to say I learned pretty quickly that one does not simply Get Into taxidermy!

Happy New Year!

Resolution: to enhance my jewelry making skills and do at least 1 local artisan craft fair :)

First & second purchase round of beads.

Home-leathered black bear hide charm. This is 1 of 7 charms I made from several small remnants cut from the bear hide hat my hubby & I are working on. It is detailed with one wild turkey and one pheasant feather. And, obviously, beads from the above photo. This piece, the largest scrap of the bunch, became a Christmas gift for my mom.

Another favorite. Green and purple jasper chip beads with copper spacers. Pheasant feathers.

Prototype & new-and-improved claw attachers.

First Post....

A funky seahorse doodle from a few years ago.