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Saturday, April 13, 2013

North American Rough Skinned Newts


These are North American Rough Skinned Newts in pure olive oil, brought to you by The Happy Medium.  The inside label states, “Loaded full of tetrodotoxin our newts are sure to cause paralysis and even death if used properly.  A must have for any Zombification ritual. “
Rough Skinned Newts are not only adorable, they are highly toxic.  Tetrodotoxin can indeed cause paralysis and death.  Whether or not you can use it to make zombies hasn’t been proven, but luckily my potions don’t fall under FDA regulations. 

I imagine The Happy Medium is just that, a cheery sort that prefers tea leaves and tarot cards, but she has a crystal ball on display, because clients like to see that sort of thing.  This potions bit is just something she does on the side out of her kitchen, which works out quite well except for that unfortunate incident with the ingredients mix-up while making tea cakes for the church bake sale. 
I also imagine she has a penchant for decorating with doilies, which probably explains the label.  It’s all pink and purple with swirly flowers and starry fonts, which by the way is 101! Star Lit Nght by Nght’s Place. 

I like to repurpose cereal boxes for folded labels.  They are just the right thickness and they already have nice straight folds along the sides.  I used a 1/8” hole punch, with some raffia to attach it to the bottle.
For newts I used soft plastic fishing bait. They reacted with the floral water gel and infused it with their beautiful green hue, but they also curled up, shrunk and sunk to the bottom.

2 comments:

  1. Why would you want to kill "adorable" newts for your artistic penchant?

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    1. I wouldn’t kill anything for art. For the sake of full disclosure I will occasionally use found objects that were once part of a living creature and last week I murdered a mass of tent worms, not for art but for my tree. I didn’t like having to do, but I really like my tree. As for my “newts” they are soft fishing bait, which is plastic. To avoid any future confusion, I’ve changed “soft fishing bait” to “soft plastic fishing bait”. Thanks for bringing it to my attention that my wording wasn’t clear.

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