Josefiend

I love my Seahawks. I love their scrappiness, their ability to overcome and change the minds of the naysayers, the big ol tummies of the blockers, and their collective, contagious passion. I’ve loved watching Seattle come together to support and celebrate our team, so it made sense to illustrate my support of the Seahawks with meat.

Heading into the project, I knew I was setting my sights a little high with my desire to create a Trojan tube meat bronco being ridden by a triumphant, defiant Seahawk. But unlike the media and all the folks who thought the Broncos would win, I believed in the underdog, I mean the hot dog.

As I gathered my supplies, I was surprised to discover I have 8 boxes of food coloring. Eight. Clearly, I’m a color-loving girl. I recently learned that adding food coloring to boiling water is an ingenious way to color spaghetti and hot dogs. It’s a bit disturbing to gaze into a pot of boiling green water and tube meat, but as every artist knows, great art requires sacrifice.

In my meat escapades, I’ve learned that a slice here and a cut there in a pre-cooked hot dog yields stellar post-boiling results. Sometimes I’m successful, sometimes I create tube meat horrors. Creativity and tube meat are about flexibility.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have any spaghetti to use for the mane and tail of the horse, so I improvised with hot dogs. I made careful cuts lengthwise down the hot dog, leaving about 1″ uncut at the top.

Since I’ve never made the body of a bird before, I tried several variations of a “V” cut into hot dogs, hoping to achieve a feathered look. Once the cuts were made, I put everything into the boiling green water.

I was pretty pleased with the mane/tail, but the Hawk bodies looked a lot like spiked penises. Eeeeee.

Equally as terrifying to the green Seahawk bodies were the dyed blue chicken luncheon meat. Maybe it was unwise to use the neon blue food coloring as the results were shudder-worthy.

Shifting back to the real meat of the project (ha haha), I got busy with the Lil Smokies. Channeling Clydesdales, I used hot dogs for the hoofs, then threaded Lil Smokies on a bamboo skewer.

For the body, I made a latticework of Lil Smokies and toothpicks. I’m usually pretty good at winging it, but this project would have benefited from prototyping and/or advanced planning. Using toothpicks to hold things together works well for everyday meat art, but in this case, the toothpicks were just to rigid. In hindsight, I might have been more successful had I used actual string to thread the mini weenies together. Glue might have also worked well.

It took several attempts, many sacrificed weenies, two puncture wounds, and 5 slices of Dave’s Killer Bread, but I finally got a horse body. From there, I build the horse head and neck, added the mane and tail and BAM! I made a horse! Neigh-ver say something cannot be done!

Once I had the horse mostly standing on its own, I added the triumphant Seahawk with fetching blue wings. Then, as soon as I’d taken a couple of pictures, the horse crumbled and fell. Having made this art prior to the Super Bowl and Seattle’s CRUSHING defeat of the Denver Broncos, this is a clear example of foreshadowing.

I love my city. I love my Seahawks. We are the 12th man.