My Literary Turkey

 I think that Anthropologie started it all with beauties like these:

Frankly, all those animal heads don't hold a lot of interest for a Montana girl.  I have seen plenty of the real thing.  Endless men in camo holding their latest trophy up for the camera, then spending hundreds of dollars for taxidermy so that they can re-live their glorious elk/muley/whitetail/bear/mountain lion/fish tale.  And lots of good humored women tolerating that thing on their bed/living/rec room wall.  So the idea of an animal head, papier mache or otherwise, just doesn't do it for me.  

Then Beth at Home Stories A to Z inspired me with her post on how to make feathers out of book pages. I couldn't help myself.  Because Thanksgiving's almost here, and I got inspired. I went to Google to check out a real turkey.

 My model?  Pretty good, dontcha think?

Check out my turkey:

He's made from a core of rumpled newspaper and painter's tape.  His legs are kebab skewers pumped up with more newspaper and painter's tape.  Skewers provided the stiffness for the wings and the rear grouping of tailfeathers.  His head was hand-molded in two halves from a pile of wet toilet paper.  Yep, you read that right.  Wet toilet paper.  You know how wet toilet paper dries in a hard little lump (like when somebody threw it onto the bathroom ceiling in high school?  Oh, nobody did that at your high school?  Nevah mind.)  I just molded it onto a plate, trying hard to mirror the two sides.  I glued them together when they were fully dry. 

I used Mod Podge throughout for paper stiffener.  It was great because it dried fast, and was pretty darned hard, even when I had to start adding the feather assemblies.

 All in all, I think he turned out pretty well.  And he adds a little sumpthin' to our mantel display.  

Gobble, gobble!

Love,

Sass

P.S. Partying HERE.