pjb3, the skin on your Quail probablly didn't shrink when you washed it. Washing a bird doesn't make the skin shrink. In fact it aids in stretching the sking sort of speak. It sounds like you were off on your measurments when you tried to fit your foam body to your bird. The best advise I can give you is to measure your carcus at several different areas such as length, girth, neck, etc. Regarding using sawdust to dry your bird skins, I'm not sure how sawdust can dry a skin or how you would go about doing that. Some people choose to tumble skins in sawdust, corncob grit or a similar product to aid in the drying process to save time, but I have never liked doing that because your bird when your finsihed looks like it was tumbled. Just use forced air with VERY low heat or no heat at all to dry your skins. Hope that helps. John
