Mexican free-tailed bat. Yes, again! And goodbye to it!

Like the second hoatzin, this Bat II was commissioned and thus was fated to fly away as soon as the final needle stab fell upon its fuzzy abdomen.  Like the first hoatzin, I still had the first bat, because its owner has not yet picked it up.

Also like the second hoatzin, I improved upon the second bat a little:

More pictures under the fold.

I have a tablet!!

I used to have an Intuos tablet with a serial port, which I bought way back when I thought serial ports were The In Thing. This was a horribly long time ago. The last two (or three? two and a half?) computers I've owned had no serial ports at all, and apparently tablets don't like serial-to-usb converters. So imagine my joy when a friend of my husband's just gave me his old USB port tablet!

First thing I did was draw the next cretur I'll be working on: a greater chevrotain. It was just a quick "whee I have a tablet" exercise so you may notice I just kind of copied the photo in the Wikipedia article.

So consider this a cretur preview! Chevrotain! Look forward to it, and so on!

Back from NYC

I've been away for a week, enjoying as many New York City wonders as I could possibly cram into a week. I don't think I've ever walked so much in my life, and I kind of miss it already, though my feet sure don't. The only real free time I had was at the airport, waiting for the plane that would take us to NYC. I spent it needlefelting, thinking that surely this would not be the only downtime in the trip that I could use to be productive. BUT IT WAS.

I was listening to This American Life.

Most of our time was spent in museums, and getting to museums. We ate delicious food that we often found by going "oh man I am hungry, let's find someplace to eat" in the middle of a museum-bound trek.

The first museum we visited was the Museum of Natural History.

Look at those silly knees!

I took a few photos, some of them of creturs I intend to make in the future. Click on "read more" to see them, if you'd like.

Finished - needle felted Mexican free-tailed bat (Tadarida brasiliensis)

As usual, tried some new techniques... this time, aside from some experiments in the needling process, it was sewing, for the wings. I am terrible at it, generally, but I think it worked out pretty well in this case. What do you think?

More pictures: