As a very small child I loved to go Mountain Trout fishing in a tiny creek running through Mr. Dorloff's farm at East Cove. This little excursion was one my brother David and I loved to undertake on almost every trip to the shack until we were old enough to take the dingy out and do some "real" fishing in Adventure Bay.
After planning the excursion in detail, as children do, we would dig out our stick fishing poles from the old shed. These were equipped with only a metre or so of precious catgut and a tiny hook. On our way up the creek through the bush and farm paddocks to our favourite stretch of water where some deeper water was accessed via a small plank bridge, we needed to search out a few earthworms to use as bait...these were very easily found under a cow pat, flicked over with a stick, always a reliable source of worms, just in case you ever need to know. A word of advice here though, always choose a cow pat that is well dried...
The little fish we caught on our fishing excursions we called Mountain Trout, but I now know them to have been Spotted galaxias, a small endemic fresh water fish. We rarely caught many, and only occasionally a "whopper", although I do clearly remember the time when David caught a huge one (it must have been at least 10 cm long!), using a daisy flower for bait as we had run out of worms.
We were not allowed to go fishing and waste the catch. We were responsible for cleaning the fish we arrived home with and then mum would cook them for our lunch...I well remember how delicious they were, although very bony. Lovely memories...
The "Trout" is also one of my favourite pieces of music. Schubert's "Trout Quintet", or the Piano Quintet in A major, D. 667, to give it it's proper name.
This quintet was composed in 1819 when Schubert was 22 years old. However, it was not published until 1829, a year after his too early death.
It was written for piano, cello, violin, viola and double bass rather than the more usual piano and string quartet.
This video records a wonderful group of young and extraordinary musicians...I was thrilled when I discovered this video a couple of years ago...it is one I return to quite often when I am working in my craft room.
The trout image is nicely coloured and detailed and being a png. file has no background to confuse things.
I printed out three images in the right size on good quality photo paper on the trusty Epson, the best image printer of the four I have available, to ensure the image was crisp. I then cut out the inch sized bottom layer and the 1.5" square mount board piece for it to reside on.
With one of the two remaining little images I trimmed out the head and body including the dorsal fin down to the tail join with a craft knife, then on the remaining image I cut out just the head using the gill line as my cutting line...this was all a bit tricky as my eyes are giving me gip lately and my vision is quite poor and unreliable at the moment.
I edged each of these two tiny pieces with a light pinky-brown marker to disguise the cut edges and mounted them together using Helmar Scrap Dots adhesive...a dimensional paste that creates the appearance of depth and is perfect for this technique.
I left these to dry for a few hours, it will be at least over night before it is fully set, before carefully applying Glossy Accents over the body and head of the fish. Several drying hours later I returned to mount the little fish on it's brown mounting square when I gave the tail and pectoral fin a coat of clear Wink of Stella just to give those lower details a hint of fishy shine.
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