Let me start by apologizing for not keeping up this blog more regularly. We are in the process of selling our house right now. We've recently received an offer on it and it looks like we might be moving out of state sometime in the next few months. I will try my best to continue blogging, but I've got a lot on my plate right now.
That being said, I have no idea what I'm going to do with this partially mummified chicken when we move. Casia and I opened him up again about a week ago. He still reeks.
There was no pool of water in the bag this time, but there was plenty of clumpy salt. It was moist so it's still drawing out the water, but it was actually very difficult to clean the salt off of the chicken. Last time, he was sitting in the water in the bag, so it wiped off easily. This time I was tempted to get the hose to clean him off, but instead settled for just brushing off as much salt as I could (or rather, I made Casia do that dirty work- it builds character).
Once Casia had cleaned off as much salt as possible, I held him open so she could scrape salt out from the cavity. We then weighed Nkuku. He gained half a pound!
Casia and I discussed reasons why he might actually weigh more this time than last and came up with two possibilities:
1. The salt that we could not brush off or out of Nkuku is adding the weight.
OR
2. Our bathroom scale is imprecise. I've known since before this experiment that it's very inaccurate and to tare it I basically slide this dial back and forth until it looks like it's pointing at zero. I highly recommend to anyone wishing to try this themselves to get a decent scale.
So after the weigh-in, we bagged him back up with a lot more salt and put him back in the sealed container. Overall, we didn't notice much of a change aside from less water. He's still stinky, still stiff, and his coloring looks like a chicken that's been rubbed with lots of cinnamon. ;)
Your cousin Allie, sent me a link to your blog because I teach a home school art class in my town. The stuff you guys have done is really interesting!
ReplyDeleteDanielle
Thanks, Danielle! Too bad you're not closer- I'm sure Casia would love to take an art class with you. Do you have a blog or website?
ReplyDeleteWow this is awesome. I want to mummify a chicken too :)
ReplyDeleteDo you know about Bob Brier and his mummification project?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EroU1P_QICU
How much salt are you using? Brier says that it takes 400lbs to mummify a human. So thats roughly 2.6lbs of salt to one pound of flesh.
ReplyDeleteBrian, that's a great video! I enjoyed listening to Bob Brier speak and learned a lot too- thanks for sharing it.
ReplyDeleteSo far, we salted Nkuku with a combined total of 9.75lbs of salt (2 containers of 1 lb 10 oz each, three times). I think that may be our problem- not enough salt. I'm planning on opening him up again this week and I really hope to see some better progress.
My procedure is very different than their mummification process. I like how they filled the cavity with linen bags of natron; way better than just dumping the salt in. It's a challenge to then get it out. Plus they used the whole amount of natron all at once and I'm doing it in stages. I highly recommend watching the video to anyone who wants to do a mummification.