hanhepi's deer skull

2010-04-30 [Skydancer]: Nicely shot!

2010-04-30 [Teufelsweib]: awesoooooome! :O *incredibly jealous* too bad it doesn't have the antlers anymore :)

2010-04-30 [hanhepi]: i'm thinking of gluing the antlers back on. but should i use super glue or elmer's? ah, the dilemmas of life.

2010-04-30 [Skydancer]: Likely elmers outdoor wood glue. Its too pouris to use super glue on

2010-04-30 [hanhepi]: oh, awesome! i think i even have a tube of that out in the shed.

2010-04-30 [hanhepi]: damn, the dog ate the scapula! then she grabbed the lower jaw while i was out there showing the kids the possum jaw! no damage to the lower jaw, but the flat part of the scapula is gone. so much for making a scraper out of that one. lol.

2010-05-01 [Skydancer]: are any of the leg bones still there by any chance?

2010-05-01 [hanhepi]: some. the wild animals (or dogs) have gotten a few. the ribcage is still fairly intact though. you need a couple?

2010-05-01 [Skydancer]: Nods, I do actually, a friend is making a weaving tool.

2010-05-01 [hanhepi]: which part of which set of legs do you need? i'll go see if i can find it here in a little while.

2010-05-02 [Easterling]: Wow, interesting. x) I read my friend's hunter-magazin the other day, and there was a step-to-step-demonstration on how making a beaver-skull look nice. xD

2010-05-03 [hanhepi]: oh, cool! what did they suggest you do?

at the last pow-wow i went to one of the vendors had taken a buffalo skull and covered it in a really pale colored leather, and put a 8 inch beaded circle in the middle of it's forehead... that was beautiful.

2010-05-04 [Easterling]: First, you'd start with a skinned beaver head. Then you'd boil it in interwalls, and take off the meat in little bit time to time. Then you'd bleach the skull, but importantly, not the theet!

2010-05-04 [hanhepi]: oh, just to get it to look like that. i understand. i thought maybe they were decorating it. lol.

2010-05-05 [Teufelsweib]: it's just too bad that boiling the skull can also deform it, and in some animals dissolve it completely. it destroys the cartilage. some other people I've heard say you should keep it in water at 70 C for about 2 hours, and others say you shouldn't boil it at all put just pick the meat off with a pincet and use a hard brush for the nasty pieces. I always go for the latter just to be sure, but there are also special chemical-stuffs that dissolve all the meat.
but in the end, I have no idea what works best, I just know that the people from my uni who explained this all to me, said they never boiled the bones x)

2010-05-05 [hanhepi]: they use beetles to do the cleaning here a lot. i'm considering using the ants in my yard to finish cleaning the very greasy leg bone i want to try to do something with. the only problem with that is i'm trying to make the ants go away, not encourage them to stay here. lol.

2010-05-05 [Triola]: Well, can't you tempt them with the bone and then remove it to a place far away while they're crawling all over it, leave it until it's clean, and solve both problems at once?

2010-05-05 [Easterling]: Ha ha, no decorations! xD I've got hard times understanding why people would like a scull as decoration in the first place. A skull with glitter and other bling bling things would be totally not-understandable!! xD Ha ha!


Teu: Yes, that was what they were trying to demonstrate. I didn't get much, though... :P

Triola: You'd still need to bleach it!

2010-05-05 [Teufelsweib]: well, once the bone is clean of the meat the ants should go away anyway, no? :P

2010-05-06 [hanhepi]: no no, decorated like these http://paintedskulls.com/ or these http://www.prairieedge.com/native-arts-crafts/skulls/ although, your glitter on a skull could be cute.