Walking that really thin line, or tight rope...

So many of you know me as your fun loving aesthetician or makeup artist.  But since my 30th year, I've been studying and practicing the art of taxidermy.  I spent my 30th birthday elbow deep in a fox that some kind gentleman on the internet was kind enough to send me as my first mount.

Tonight, I am embarking on the beginning of a project for a friend.  My dearest friend Diana had to put her ferret down two years ago, and brought him straight to me for preservation.  My original idea was to clean the bones and reassemble the skeleton for her.  Sadly, I'm afraid to loose any of the bones, so in an inspiration I decided to try mummification.   So meet Fritz.... (guitar pick for scale)

Fritz is a feeder mouse rescued from the pet store freezer, in order to fuel my desire to study small anatomy and do some work that's not huge.  I thought that anatomy might be similar only in a smaller scale.

So I made an abdominal incision and separated the fascia from the skin working from the edge of the incision around back making sure not to disturb any of the organs.

Once I had gotten everything separated I had to snip off at the leg joints and at the base of the skull.  I'll spare you all the pile of gore next to the skin.  I did manage to get the intestines, liver, kidneys and heart all in nice little piles, but everything was so small it seemed silly to preserve them.  Thus, the next picture a hollow little mousy.

Clean and freshly washed.

Scraped clean and coated with the first coat of resin and preservation powder.

Resined ears, these will not be wrapped in the finished product.

Second coat of resins and cotton soaked in preservation resins and essential oils.

All sewn up.  Coat of resin on the face, ears and tail.  Feet tied together for drying and resined as well.

Buried in preservation salts.

I've read 60 days for a full grown human and a dry place, but since this critter is so small I'm going to keep an eye on it for a week or so and see how things start looking.  So far, this is the nicest smelling piece of taxidermy I've ever done.  I look forward to seeing how this turns out.  The next step will include wrapping it and resining it again.    More when the drying process is complete.