Houston, We Have A Problem......

My plan was to show you a finished pot of bat wing and toadstool soup on the stove, in the cottage. This won't be happening. My pot is leaking! I used the same kind of pot for this as I did for the stew yesterday. I decided to try the resin for this one because it is clearer than the liquid Sculpey. I am going to have to wait for it to dry. Hopefully that will seal the bottom of the pot and then I can refill it.

At the present time we have brothless(Is that a word?Maybe not. You know what I mean.) soup. Tessie insisted on fresh bat wings. I refused to let her kill any bats. She sat me down and explained that she would never kill cute little bats just for bat wing soup! It seems that she has cooked up a spell that turns the bats into mice. Their wings drop off when they change. They scamper off to get acquainted with the other mice in the house and live happily ever after. Their wings are left there for the taking. She says that it is totally painless. However I noticed a couple of them trying to fly off of the edge of the table and landing on their noses on the floor. They learn quickly. We now have 6 new mice gnawing their way through the walls of the cottage.......

Tessie asked me to share her recipe with you. She uses 12 bat wings, some chopped, some left whole for decoration around the edge of the pot. there are 13 Death Cap toadstools. Again some are sliced and some left whole. The red is 13 holly berries. The green leafy stuff is Mugwort. The yellow and black stuff that is chopped up is 13 Monarch butterflies. She assures me that they only live a few days and she collects them after they pass on to the next world. She says that they impart a flavor very similar to saffron. A note about the 13. You may be wondering why only 12 bat wings were used. It's simple. She doesn't like even numbers, but she also doesn't like leftovers. If she used 13 there would be one extra. If she used 14, the flavor would be too strong. She's very practical.

Tessie will be growing her own toadstools as soon as the garden is set up. I had to make some this morning because she didn't have any on hand. Here's how I did it.

For the Death Caps, I used burnt sienna and white mixed to make a beige color. I rolled a 1/4" snake and an 1/8" snake. I cut the 1/4" snake into 1/4" or smaller slices and rolled them into a ball. I cut each ball in half and pushed them to a soft point on top with my fingers. I also rolled a really tiny snake of burnt sienna and sliced it very thin. Each slice was pressed as thin as I could make it. Then I scraped it off of the tile with my clay blade. I put a round of it on the underside of each toadstool. Then I rolled a short piece of the 1/8" beige into a semi cone shape and stuck it to the middle of the burn sienna with liquid Sculpey to make sure it stayed in place.

Tessie also likes to grow these cute little toadstools. I am not sure of the name, but she assures me that they are very necessary for some of her best spells.

These, I made in the same manner as the Death Caps. I used straight white for the stems and cadmium red for the caps. The only things that I did differently was no burnt sienna and after they were baked I added the spots with acrylic paint on the end of a toothpick.

I am going back now and have my reality checked. Real housework and laundry are interfering with my mini world. I hate when that happens!

See you tomorrow.