Re: OOC # 31
Ah, the unexpected challenges of having birds as pets...
I'm making masks for an upcoming production of Beauty and the Beast. Decided to do them out of foam latex for a variety of reasons. Not the first time, but I didn't have birds when I used it before. Didn't even think about it potentially being risky (parakeets are tiny little things, it doesn't take much to do them in) until I was re-reading the processing instructions and they said "Do not use an oven used for food preparation. The curing process releases toxic gases."
Now, I already knew that part...just didn't think about it at all until that moment...right before I was about to put the molds in the oven. I almost never cook anything in my oven...it's been used way more for curing molds or making sugar-glass bottles to break on stage than it's been used for food prep in the last decade, and it's not like I'm mass-producing prosthetics...I'm making maybe two or three every other year, so I'm not worried about poisoning myself (I know a guy who made WAY more prosthetics than I do, and he'd been doing it for years, using his family's 9ven, and they never had any problems, so I'm confident that I'm okay.)
But the birds...I mean, I know people who have killed parakeets by cooking with a teflon-lined pan in another room. The flip-side is, when they were still back-stage at the park, my friend who's had parakeets for a few years was worried that the hazers we use to make it look "smoky" on stage so you can see the beams from all the lights were going to kill the birds, and they didn't seem to notice it at all. So, my fingers are crossed that I'll still have two birds in the morning...