Welcome to your future.

A couple Saturdays ago I spent the day out in the Great Northeast at the Holemesburg Fish & Game Protective Association giving lectures on taxidermy to the youth of America.  I tend to be very awkward around children; I don't understand them, I find them too unpredictable and difficult to communicate with so it's probably not hard to imagine me lying awake the night before wondering just what the hell I was supposed to say to these kids.  I had no idea what to expect.







What I got was a mixed bag of awesome and insane.  I set up my booth and braced myself for the impending waves of children.  They came in groups of ten, I would talk for about twenty minutes, and the next group would arrive.  Some were as young as four, and were quite enthusiastic about grabbing my deer legs right off the table and beating my coyote rug with them.







Some were as old as 19, and I found them much easier to speak with.  In fact, a good deal of the young people there were part of an organization called "Police Explorers", which is basically like young junior cadets.  The police academy was right next to the park, and these kids come out and train every weekend.  They were in full uniform, complete with polished boots and utility belts with mace and cuffs.  I found them incredibly fascinating; they were all engaging, articulate, and driven.







Very impressive.  Over at the Academy a SWAT team was performing detonation drills and one of the officials came over to warn me about the impending blasts.  I told him I'd already heard (felt, actually) the first one and he explained that no, that was an actual device being detonated and not a drill.  They'd picked it up in Germantown the day before.  I think the junior cadets were laughing at me as my jaw dropped.  "I didn't hear anything about that on the news," I said, to which one of the teens responded, "That's cause people would go nuts".



I was really starting to like these kids.



There were other stations set one, one was a fur trapper:







He was popular because he brought a trap and had kids stick their fingers in it for fun.



Then there was the local game commissioner.







Oh, and shooting.







Lots and lots of shooting.  Balloons as targets, cause it was a youth event I guess.  That's my buddy David below, he's a really nice kid and budding taxidermist!







Shooting black powder...or muzzle-loading, I'm still not entirely sure.







Cross bow shooting-I made friendly with that guy later in the day and he gave me some tips on tuning my bow.  Now I just need to get some arrows and find a place to practice.







Overall, it was a rewarding experience. I'm still editing the video footage from the day; it includes the motorcycle rally that came through out of nowhere.







Oh, and after seeing myself in my boyfriend jeans from the back, I will never be wearing them again.

Squirt.

This morning I was skinning a duck in preparation for a taxidermy demonstration I'll be giving on Saturday.  I plan on having some finished mounts as well as a cured skin to show various stages in the process.  Sounds fine right?  Except it's for children.  Children terrify me.  Last night I was envisioning speaking to them and I cringed at myself as I lay in bed, marveling at what a nerd these kids will think I am.   I was a kid once, and I know first hand they are cruel, and nothing people over the age of thirty do could ever be cool.



Wait, WHY do I care what a bunch of children think of me?  I guess at the end of the day I don't.  Amway, I'm thinking about all this as I skin my duck, and I'm at the head. I'm angling my brain-spoon around the back of the eye sockets to free the eyeball and SQUIRT!  A stream of black eyeball juice lands upon my shirt, my arm, my face, MY EYE.  I have duck eye juice in my human eyeball. This was the first time I popped one, and I never knew how inky the liquid is.  I wonder if it could be used as dye?







After cleaning up that mess I was able to focus on the task at hand, only to find a very broken wing.  Break one, humerus bone:







Break two, radius and ulna:







It's not really that big of a deal when wings are shattered like this but it does pose a challenge when skinning.  It's relatively easy to use the whole arm for leverage when working the skin off, but when the arm is just a pile of mush there isn't much to hold onto.



Thankfully I had my studio mascot there to keep me company while I worked.







Ever since I cleaned my studio and organised it in a fashion which is conducive to how I work, it's been a nonissue having the cats around. Frankie sometimes manages to sniff out any mouse tidbits I have hiding around but aside from that he doesn't care to get into the other animals.  It's very pleasant to have him sleeping at my feet in his little patch of sun while I work.



This is my newly cleaned studio.  It may look cluttered but I have a ton of stuff in a very small space.  Amazingly, everything has a home and I know where it lives.







Work table and mini freezer:







Supply shelving, windows, and Frankie!

Some of these things were never like the others...

Here are some new pieces that I just got around to getting decent pictures of, thanks to my full time live-in photographer James Coughlin.  You can see more of his work  at Snap Blam Splat.  Honestly, I don't know what I would do without him.  Well, I do actually, I would pay through the nose to rent the equipment and go insane trying to figure it all out. Dude makes a wicked tie-dye too.



This is the hen from a month back; I just got her back from the "Other Nature" how at BahdeeBahdu, which received a nice write-up on Cool Hunting.  I wound up going with the name "Nascita Typica".



















This is the hat I wore to the Polo Cup;it's a female Bufflehead which has been embellished beyond the point of no return.



















And this is the male Bufflehead hat I wore to the Devon horse show a couple of weeks ago.  He's naturally flashy so I let his real colors shine.

Never enough Chuckers

Yesterday two of my best gals and I took a field trip out to the Brandywine Polo Club for a Chester County hospital fundraiser game. It was a lavish affair and I have to say, for a crew of newbies, we really did it well.  We parked our picnic blanket in front of what turned out to be the tents of seasoned club members who took us under their wings and enlightened us to the nuances of the game.  We also brought a few bottles of champers and grapefruit juice (greyhounds, baby) and plenty of snacks.



OK, enough beating around the bush. I won.  The set-up was such that the hat ladies had to just walk around and get noticed by the judges.  Trust me, wearing a dead duck on your head gets plenty of notice.  I left a wake of cocked heads all up and down that bitch.  I posed for pictures with the other winners.  I posed for pictures with old men.  I posed for pictures that I may not have even been in.  I love cameras that much.



At half time, before they announced winners, us gals got to march onto the filed and stomp the divots of upturned grass back into place.  I came really close to working my clog into a "steamer".  I'll let y'all figure that one out for yourselves.







A few minutes later the winners were announced and paraded out onto the field.  It's hard to tell but the little girl up there was wearing a hat with a bird's nest on it.  She was a very gracious adversary.







As we learned more about the game during the second half, we all grew a bit more invested in the outcome.  It didn't hurt that one of the players on the winning team is apparently the rock star of the club.  Women were practically fainting all over the place every time his horse charged by.  Guess which one:







I don't know, I think it's more about the gear and the horses than the man.  Not to discredit all the oodles of talent on that field though.  We three caught the fever, and I for one am eager to get back and have another taste.   Where else can I wear taxidermy on my person?

Hat Parade High Jinks

Last week my gal-pal Sarah and I trotted out my two new hats to the Devon horse show and participated in the hat parade.  I went the conservative route in terms of design, something I'm happy I tried but don't think I'll do again.  Notice how both birds are completely lacking in embellishment. I figured I would embrace the beauty nature had given them but in the end I feel like they fell short.  Plus I only came in third. I think if I'd gone with my gut I would've swept the whole thing.







As soon as I snatched up my yellow ribbon Sarah and I embarked on our mission of getting as intoxicated as possible on the free Cartier Champagne in the judges stand. I, to ease the crushing sense of failure and disappointment in seeing what I felt entitled to go to someone else.  Sarah, well she just likes free booze. We brown bagged a fifth of voddie, bummed some smokes off a carnie or two and called it a day.







You can take the girls out of Philly...but you can't make them drink.  Rather, you can lead a fillie to water, but...



Oh nevermind I've got to get back to work on a new hat.  Sunday is another hat contest and I'm going armed with the knowledge of how these things work this time.  Well, not really because I'm still clueless.  Pretending to be wealthy is exhausting; I can't wait until I actually am the real McCoy just so I can relax already and kick my feet up without worrying someone will see the trace of a neon green sticker on the bottom of my second-hand Ferragamos.



Until then, I will keep faking it until I make it.  I'll check in again after the Polo Cup so set your eyes to tranquil because my next post will be full of BLUE.