129v - - - - - Animals oven dried for a long time
Stick your animals on a slab of earth, fix them with sharp pointed iron wires, as if you wanted to mold them, then dry them into an oven as hot as when bread has been taken out. It is the same for snakes, birds and other animals. But they have to be promptly dried.
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Note that you have to arrange them and put them into the sand as for flowers, and promptly dry them in an oven as warm as when bread has been taken out. Leave it there one day and one night in order for them to be very dry, otherwise it would stink. However, be sure that the oven is not too hot, it should be as warm as the sun in June, otherwise the animals would cook. Once they are dry, do not soak them; clean them with a brush or a paintbrush.
Animals casted in copper
Once casted in copper, try to burnish them as we do with leaves made from gem, to see if they will get the same color.
Advice about casting
Be careful that your cast is not too thick, and do not forget to make 2 or 3 holes and notches in the conduit, when your cast is coming near the molded thing, divide it between 3 or 4 parts like fingers, and not deep. Thus the metal will run more gently, without preventing vapors and smoke.
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Always make the entry of you cast close to the medal and the notch, when lumpy, it will lessens the metal’s fury.
To cast a spider on a leaf, and to prevent the sand from covering the under belly, fix a bit of melted wax at the end of its tail, and bottom part of the body, with the help of a warm wire as you know. Once the leaf has burnt and the wax has melted, two small holes remain on the leaf, that will be the cast of the spider.
Casting a spider on a leaf
Usually big spiders have hairy legs, which are difficult to mold if you do not lay hairs down flat, or if you don’t burn them with the flame of a candle, or if you stiffen them and lay them flat by oiling them with wheat oil. Kill them into vinegar and urine, like snakes, or in spirits. Then arrange your them on a beautiful vine leaf, or another leaf, then you can make the undisciplined hair look like tamed hair by rubbing them with mouth glue, or something similar. Their true color is vinegar or greenish. And season with sulphur in random places. Arrange your slab of clay and place your vine leaf on it, your dead spider in the middle. Pierce the middle of the spider’s body with the tip of an iron or latten wire. Then fix diagonally some small latten tacks all around the vine leafs in order to secure it. Then block the end of the legs with a bit of melted wax using a warm iron wire, and smooth it out with the tip of a pair of small pincers. do the same with the other edges of the spider. Return🜊
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🜊 🜊 When the wax is cool, scrape away the superfluous parts with the point of a penknife, that way the end of the legs will stay neat. Then arrange the disc of earth around the spider, and cast your soaked sand, as you did for others. In this fashion you will have to burn the vine leaf in the mold. Otherwise, you will not have to. To cast your spider more easily, make sure the animal is dead, avoiding the entanglement of its legs while agonizing. When you have done your first cast, peel this side of the leaf, then do the second cast.