Something a little bit different volunteering-wise...

I've been meaning to blog about this for AGES as I've been doing it a few months now but you know what I'm like, I procrastinate like a boss. Unfortunately I seem to have lost most of the photos I took near the beginning which is a real pain but I still have enough to get by with.

Anyway, moving on...

I've been meaning to get involved with some voluntary work for a while now but until recently hadn't really felt up to doing anything. A chance comment about helping one of my dad's work colleagues snowballed and I'm now coming to work with him every other Friday to help out Laurence with some things.

Myself and 'Matisse' the Mallard.

 Hey, wait...are those wires coming out of his legs?

Oh, didn't I mention? My dad works for Glasgow Museums and Laurence is the taxidermist. ;)

(Sorry, I couldn't resist! XD)

I won't be doing any actual taxidermy though sadly, I'm assuming the role of 'Groundwork Preparator' (in layman's terms, I make nice scenic bases for the mounted specimens)

But bear in mind that there will be a lot of photos in this post - some of which include 'in progress' shots of the taxidermy so if it really isn't your thing, my apologies. I'll link to anything that could be considered graphic so you don't need to see anything gory though. :)

I've always loved taxidermy (blame my dad for that - we usually had at least one dead mouse in the freezer ready to be taken into work when I was growing up) and one of my earliest memories of Kelvingrove Museum was the big woodland diorama case with all manner of native species mingling in amongst the undergrowth. It was one of those displays that you could examine for hours and still find something new each time! Sadly, the current trend is for everything to be displayed 'cleanly' with ugly perspex bases and everything on open display (which really isn't good for the specimens...but more on that later) so good dioramas are in fairly short supply and my beloved woodland dio was taken apart and dismantled when the museum was renovated a number of years ago. I won't be making anything particularly large, or indeed, to go on display in the museum; however those I do make will be loaned out to the Open Museum and the like so they'll still be seen by a large number of people!

The workshop is definitely my kind of room - all organised chaos with bits and pieces scattered all over the place...

What's that in the corner? Oh nothing, just the 133 year old Sloth who needs some of her toenails stuck back on. ;D Isn't she lovely? (and don't Sloths have the weirdest hands?!)


The first day I went, I met up with my fellow volunteer Barbara who, unlike myself, won't be making bases, but instead will be dissecting some of the unmounted and relatively fresh specimens and examining them for parasites. You know, as you do. :P (she's doing it at uni I think)  Laurence has been showing her how to make a bird skin which works out well because not only does she get to dissect something and learn from the gory bits, but the museum also gains another valuable addition to the collection. (Unlike the traditional mounted specimens you're used to seeing on display, skins are mainly kept for for research and have all the internals bar the skull, leg and wing bones removed - a lot trickier than you'd think!)


To start off with, they would be skinning out a juvenile Starling...

(-This is what was removed from the body cavity - the white stuff is preservative - and we realised afterwards that the newspaper article was strangely appropriate!-)

This was it more or less finished I believe.

...while I would be making a base for this incredibly miffed looking rabbit.

Now, I will be the first to admit that not all taxidermy is good. Some specimens have dodgy eyes, freakish anatomy etc...

 

...while others are just insane! 

 Mr Rabbit wasn't too bad, all things considered, but he was without a doubt, one of the haughtiest looking creatures I've ever seen.

Laurence cut the MDF for me and explained the basics but from then on I was pretty much left to my own devices as far as actually doing it was concerned. I was expecting it to be really technical but all it amounted to really was blobbing on a lot of wood glue and adding on the groundwork.

 Fun Fact! - Anything used in this kind of display must first be put in the freezer at very low temperatures for several weeks to kill off any lingering invertebrates or bacteria which may prove harmful to the specimens.

Mr Rabbit needed his leg wires straightened a bit but after a few minutes of gentle positioning was ready to be wired in. We marked out on the base where the wires were to go in, then drilled four holes - one for each leg - and carved out 'channels' for the wires to sit along on the underside of the base. Label on, ID number scrawled on the underside in case it got lost and wayhey, grumpy-bun had a base!

 

The following week I made a slightly more interesting base for a Rook, seen here...



Alas, all the photos I took with him actually perched on the post have gone AWOL so you'll just have to imagine it I'm afraid.




I love crows and the like and that particular specimen was gorgeous - I kept stroking his head feathers as they were so soft and lovely.

Next up was the base for the Adder. (who you can see behind the container with the blue lid in the workshop photo from earlier)

This one was left entirely up to me to design and put together and I really couldn't be more pleased with it.







The groundwork had to be mostly flat so the snake had enough space to be displayed but I thought having the bracken rise up at the back would add visual interest as well as giving an instant snapshot of the kind of habitat they live in.
Everything probably looks like it'll just blow away but it's all stuck down incredibly firmly with copious sprayings of watered down PVA! Mrs Adder hasn't been wired in yet so you'll be able to see finished photos next time I'm there.

Now, what about that Mallard from the first photo? You'll notice I called him 'Matisse', well, that was due to the state of his original base...



The person who mounted him had been using it as a palette when painting his feet and beak and I thought it wouldn't have looked out of place in a Fauvist's studio. XD You can actually see where he just painted over his feet - the underside of them are actually a totally different colour! lol

This base had to be simple so I decided to do it like a riverbank with some very fine gravel and a few choice rocks and pebbles to add interest. Gluing on the gravel was a feat in itself - it was so fine it got EVERYWHERE and if I picked the whole thing up before it had dried, big chunks of the stuff came off in my hands.

I think it worked out ok in the end however...





Matisse's leg wires were waaaaay too long so Laurence clipped them down to size and used one of the sanding wheels to give the ends points so they'd have a firmer hold on the MDF.

(Observe the colour of the feet, lol)






Before long he was wired in and I took him off to photograph...

His unfortunate leaning stance makes it look like he's laid all those stones... XD

...and finally, my absolute favourite...

...what's this?...

...a cactus?...

Nope, a hedgepig! :D :D

I absolutely love hedgehogs and this one was adorable. He was a juvenile, so was a lot smaller than I was expecting. (pocketsized, heh)

Again, the base wasn't very big but I wanted to make it look like it had just been lifted from the forest floor and was interesting to look at from every angle. I had great fun scrunching up a big pile of leaf litter and sprinkling it artistically over the whole thing! I finished it the week before last but ran out of time to put the hodgeheg in place.



My favourite part is the moss and lichen covered stick on the left.





Here, I present to you the one, the only, the incredible levitating hedgehog!





XD We needed to mark out where the leg wires would go you see...



...and doesn't he look perfectly at home there?



Genuinely, I would have taken him and the base home if I'd been allowed, I'm SO pleased with it all.










So yeah, that's what I've been doing recently! XD I start back at college this coming monday (eeek!) and will hopefully be continuing with this on fridays. My next base to tackle is for a Common Gull and then, possibly a Barn Owl!

Someone's been busy...

...making props! :D

It's weird, during college I had so many ideas for things but no time or inclination to actually get started on them, yet now...well, I think I'll let this post speak for itself. :P

Seeing as I've managed to make my in progress tack shop (tentatively named 'Bits and Pieces' for now) look slightly more like an actual shop now, rather than the disorganised heap of assorted crap that had been cluttering up the roombox for months I thought it deserved some more personalised accessories.

I'd wanted to make a grooming kit for years but until I went to college and discovered styrene had always assumed the only way to possibly make it would be to sculpt it out of fimo or sculpey which would look terrible. The other day I finally decided to just go for it and so, armed with a Robinsons catalogue, the bag of scrap leftover styrene I'd liberated from the college bins, a scalpel and what remained in my bottle of dichlo (plastic weld) I set to work. The first one I made was far too deep and out of scale but the second one turned out perfectly.



I took liberties with the design, simplifying it so it was more of a flat bottomed tray with partitions rather than things with awkward angles and overlapping sections.







Once sanded smooth I painted them with Games Workshop acrylics and added a matte sealer afterwards.You can see just how out of scale the silver one turned out here. XD



The blue one's definitely my favourite though.



All the brushes (minus the plastic brush and comb which were beads from the craft shop) are handmade out of painted and glossed sections of wooden coffee stirrers and felt. Some have handles made of fimo and ribbon. I need to make some more as this is pretty much my entire supply. XD



I used Georgie's most excellent tutorial for them - alas, unless you're a member of MHL you won't be able to see it. (but it's a fantastic little forum so I'd recommend that you join anyway. :P)

 Also needing made was, of all things, a kettle. I always thought the yard office was in need of one for making teas and coffees during the day (and cup-a-soups and bovrils during the winter!) but I wasn't prepared to pay the £8 odd one would cost from Delph Miniatures which seemed to be the only place that stocked anything similar, nice as it was.
Instead, I raided the house for parts...



Coffee pot on the left - clicky bit from a poor quality ballpoint pen from a christmas cracker, styrene lid, bead for a topper and the spout was a cut down section from the actual ink tube (?) part of the pen. The handle was from a plastic ring thing I found in a drawer and sanded down to size.

The kettle is on the right and is little more than a cut down pen lid, bead topper and the spout as before.
I'll need to update it in a future entry though as shortly after I took this I dropped it and ruined the paint so it's since been repainted.



The cable is some leftover headphone wire from a really cheap set that died a death a while agoand the plug is just styrene and foamboard. The wall socket was really easy too - just a little rectangle of styrene with the pluggy bits drawn on! I couldn't work out what to use as a charging base...until I found one of those little disc batteries for LEDs!

Onto tack now. :D

I was down south visiting my grandma last week and whilst in a fabric shop picked up this highly topical fat quarter which I made into a rug when I got home. I like to imagine that Jenny is furiously patriotic (as well as just liking red, white and blue as colours) so she'd probably celebrate the Olympics by buying her horse a suitable rug to match...



Another thing I'd been meaning to make for months, even YEARS, was padded saddlecloths like these:



Unfortunately I could never find a fabric fine enough to match so it was pushed back to being one of those things that I was unlikely to get round to, ever. Then, suddenly the other week I discovered something similar enough I could get away with - microfibre tea-towels from Poundland! XD



They were still pretty flimsy looking so I backed them with some fine fleece.





They come in black, white, red and purple but they were out of white when I was in last and as I couldn't choose between the red and purple I settled for black. I'll be watching that shop like a hawk until they restock!











Finally, yet another of those 'I'll probably never get round to it' things - electric fencing!



The stands are nothing more than bent and twisted wire sprayed white, the red wire is metallic thread/string stuff for decorating and the silvery/clear stuff below actually came from a piss-poor set of £stretcher headphones I bought the other day because I'd forgotten to put my good set in my bag and as I'd be on the train for two hours that day I needed something to listen to desperately! They were so bad that once out of the packaging only one earplug actually received any sound and even then they didn't fit my ears properly anyway so it was a poor effort all round. Really nice cables though...











Because the stands just sink into the ground and the wire is fed through the stands they're totally re positionable meaning that I can take them away with me on outings and set up a field scene in a matter of minutes!





Oh and I also made a lunge whip courtesy of a tutorial I can't find at the moment. Helpful I know but it was really just a section of wire covered in superglue and wrapped in embroidery thread. :P





So yeah, I think I'm back into the swing of things now! :D

I might do a tutorial for the grooming kits if anyone's interested?

Not Impressed.

I don't know who they are but the person behind http://ressorgblog.blogspot.de/ are guilty of theft, pure and simple.

They've copied the majority of my photostories and reblogged them word for word without so much as a link or credit and I'm not the only one who's been targeted this way.

Why do people do this? It's so STUPID! I wasn't in the best of moods today anyway but this has really made me feel awful. I've left a comment in the hope that they'll see sense and take it down but if not, Blogger mods here I come!