Before I start: please know that I am an animal lover and vegetarian, and I don't delight in the cruelty to or death of any creature, period. (the roaches in my apartment excluded.) The mice that were provided for this class died at the factory farm where they were being bred as feeders, and were otherwise going to be thrown away.

I was so delighted to take a taxidermy class this week at the Observatory Room taught by Sue Jeiven, an amateur anthropomorphic taxidermist, tattoo artist, and all-around hoot. The experience was really great-- it was surprising how little gore was involved-- it was no more gross than dressing a turkey, and the only gratuitous blood was mine when I nicked myself with the scalpel (SCALPEL = SHARP). If you're interested, this is roughly what we did, except with an air-dry clay maquette inside, rather than the mouse mummy. We used a lot of borax, actually, so it was very dry, not gooey-looking like that tutorial. Cutest part of mounting: there is a pipe cleaner inside his tail. :)
His tools are mostly little things that I grabbed from my wunderkammer, with the exception of his little mortuary/dissection kit, which I made from shrinky dinks and hedgehog spines.

I imagine Jürgen as a romantic and amateur naturalist, occasionally peeking out his study windows at the moor outside, spending nearly all his time fiddling with animals or chemicals, drawing detailed pictures of the flowers he finds and, very secretly, dabbling in a tiny bit of alchemy. ("It's old-fashioned, I know, but I do think those chaps were onto something.")

Under the break are two pics of J before he got all dressed up. No gore, but it is "real."