Happy October, Cretur Fetur Comeback Month!

Hello everyone!

I know, it's been a long time. I left the blog with no warning in the middle of a series of posts about an animal behavior conference. I did not get kidnapped or anything... mostly what happened is I went to Serbia. It was pretty amazing, and I'm still uploading photos. Here's a couple just to show I ain't lyin':

View of the Sava river from Kalemegdan fort (that's me in the foreground!)

Inside of a Church in Sremski Karlovci

Part of Tito's collection of relay staffs (that's not me in the foreground)

I also took a bit of time off of the hectic race to keep up with commissions, in order to explore other ideas that I had knocking around. I'll be bringing you up to speed little by little, dear blog. Let's do this in chronological order, shall we?

If you follow me on Tumblr, Facebook, or Twitter, you may have already seen some of these photos. But you certainly haven't seen them all, and anyway it's nice to have it all in one place.

For today, here's a couple of pigs that think they may have heard a noise in the house at night. They are not certain, but their little minds are racing with horrible possibilities.

The green one has already been taken away to a hopefully less alarming home, but the violet one is still up for grabs, and even more terrified now that she's got no one to speculate and go "oh god oh god what was that" with. Please take her, I have things to do and can't go around comforting pigs all the time!

Notes from a conference Part 2: Psychological Aspects of Abuse and Neglect

This is part 2 of a 4-part transcription of my notes from an IAABC conference. Part 1 is here. Keep in mind that these are transcribed notes, and thus don't really read as a blog post so much as a series of musings.

Warning: This is going to be a pretty sad one, being about animal abuse/neglect and PTSD and such. Skip it if you feel it will upset you, as that is not my intention. The next couple of posts will be a lot shorter and a lot less depressing.


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Psychological Aspects of Abuse and Neglect

by Dr. Frank McMillan

Bats- group photo

Oh my god, look at all these bats!

Today's stars are the Mexican Freetail and the Little Brown Bat, both of whom I've made before, but you'd hardly be able to tell considering how different all my creturs are from each other. What can I say, consistency is dull.

Mr. Freetail

Mr. Brown

Notes from a conference Part 1: Compulsive Disorder Across the Species

Hi! I went to a conference in Rhode Island last weekend, organized by IAABC. I took lots of notes in a semi-disjointed style, writing down particularly intriguing points in my notebook. In the interest of purity, I will transcribe my notes here pretty much exactly as they are in my notebook, across a 4-post series spanning 6 conferences (I took more notes in some than in others; some talks were mostly geared towards professional animal trainers and thus I couldn't quite relate). Here is the first one:

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Compulsive Disorder Across the Species

by Dr. Nick Dodman

Spotted Bat & Island Flying Fox

Oh hi! It's been a while, again!

What have you been up to? Me, I've been making bats and going to animal behavior conferences. Yeah! It was pretty awesome. I took lots of notes, I'll show them to you soon. Say, wanna see a couple of bats I finished recently? Here, take a look:

Spotted bat - Euderma maculatum

Island Flying Fox - Pteropus hypomelanus

More pictures:

More bats! Good heavens!

Here's two new designs that I finished this weekend – one regular bat that used to be a brooch, and one brooch that at least looks very very similar to the first bat I ever made. I used Sculpey for the brooch instead of Lumina, which allowed me to have much more detail AND fabric-less wings that I am actually really happy with! Hooray!

Honduran White Bat

with amazing embroidery action!

I'm told this is a "brown hoary bat" but it looks like a Mexican Freetail to me

What else is new? More bats. Lots of bats. I made a fruit bat, but the photos didn't come out so well, so I'll try again tomorrow morning and post them then. I'm also going to start work on one of these guys, apparently one of North America's rarest mammals:

Spotted Bat

2010 Secret Santa presents: three-cretur photodump!

Last year I overzealously plunged into not one, not two, but three secret santa gift trades. I will probably keep it to a maximum of two in the future, but I can't deny that I'm very pleased with the results. I'll make this a two-parter; today I will post photos of the presents I sent, and later (as soon as I receive the third present, or maybe sooner) I will post photos of the ones I got.

I present to you the Mr. Burns Toad (a new species discovered a couple of months ago in Colombia), an octopus, and a spheredoodle:

I do not know this creature's scientific name! O noes!

They went to different people, but they had time for friendship

More pictures after "read more":

Cretur Fetur gift cards and discount coupons!

I had said, on Twitter, that these guys would be available in the New Year. But I am A VERY IMPATIENT PERSON so I'm going to make them available a whole day and a half earlier! Wow, what an overachiever!

Discount coupons with every purchase!

Gift cards for your friends!

The gift cards are available here, at the Cretur Fetur Etsy store, in the Gift Cards section.

A raccoon and some tapir sketches

Even though I finished this guy a couple of weeks ago, I hadn't posted it because it was commissioned as a SECRET CHRISTMAS PRESENT and the recipient probably reads my blog on occasion. I'm pretty sure it has been delivered by now, so no surprises will be spoiled!

Procyon lotor

There are and will be more secret Christmas presents, but one has not arrived to its destination yet and two more are actually for Orthodox Christmas (Jan 7), so they will not be posted until after that date in order to not spoil anything for anyone. I really hate spoilers.

More raccoon photos and some HOT EXCLUSIVE TAPIR PLANNING:

Cretur Fetur's first invertebrate

Well, it was about time! After a million mammals and a couple of birds and amphibians, I've finally stepped into the world of arthropods. My inaugural invertebrate is a male Forficula auricularia, an earwig.

Fig. 1: F. auricularia

More pictures under "Read more":