deerskin to buckskin, part 3: sunday afternoon acidifying, membraning and soaking

after acidifying the hide in a weak vinegar bath we went on to the next bit of grunt work - membraning the hide. it took more effort than we thought it would, luckily we booked the whole weekend for this project and had plenty o' time.

a bit harder than anticipated to get off the membrane layer...and not easy to tell if it's all off!

it's business time - if you look behind the hide you can see one of the chickens eating the pieces of membrane that were falling on the tarp. emily was really enjoying watching this.

she's like - wut?

the men of the house usually kept at least 20 ft back from the hide in all stages of the process, but were supportive from a distance nonetheless. smiling alnis doesn't realize that this chicken was just eating membrane, i guess.

laura finished up the membraning while emily, katherine and i went to the uxbridge farmer's market. when we got back, the hide was totally dry and we proceeded with the dressing step. when we initially found the hide, we were told by pro hide workers to go back and retrieve the brain from the carcass in the woods so that we could dress the hide with the brains. emily did end up going back with a hacksaw, but the carcass was gone. so instead, we used eggs for the dressing step. you can actually use the brains of other animals as well in a pinch - any brains you have on hand really. for serious. we just used eggs though...this time.

next up - delirious brooke and emily wring and then soften the hide until 11pm that evening.

deerskin to buckskin, part 2: graining & rinsing

the hide had to buck for 3 days in the ivory soap solution but after spending a nice evening on friday watching some youtube gems like

 and (i hope you watched that one until at least 1:16)

we were ready to get on with the process saturday morning. next step: graining.

laura, nic & maya came over to hang out, camp out and help out, which was greatly appreciated as graining turned out to be quite a task for a sunny 30+degree C day. the grain is the part of the hide just under the fur that became bloated during the bucking process. the hair was really easy to take off, the grain, not so much. all of it had to be removed to ensure that the every part of the hide would soak up the brain (or eggs, in our case) mixture so brooke, laura and i scraped and scraped and scraped from about 10 am to 4 pm with lots of swimming throughout, a picnic dinner and campfire to finish off the day. we sprinkled the hair around the garden to ward off carrot predators and left the hide in a slightly acidic solution (by using apple cider vinegar) overnight to neutralize and prepare for the last few steps. what a day. 

work it, brooke.

laura does her scraping in a beautiful dress

maya

sabi, being a good sport

scrape scrape scrape

holy moses it's hot

end of day shot! this was actually the point where we realized for the first time what shape our hide was actually in. since we had scavenged it frozen and already removed we didn't really have an idea what we were working with.

next steps: acidifying, membraning, soaking, softening & smoking!

deerskin to buckskin, part 1: fleshing

**before you proceed, please be aware that you may find pictures & details below to be a bit gruesome. just so you know, it was actually a very pleasant experience**

so, brooke has some very very awesome friends who are involved in awesome ventures such as The P.I.N.E. Project, Sticks & Stones Wilderness School, Earth Tracks and The Art of Mentoring.  i never thought of developing my wilderness skills until i was introduced to these people and now here we are, tanning a deer hide in our backyard.

in January, brooke & i went for a stroll along Duffins Creek and saw a crowd of tracks along the frozen waterbed. obviously we climbed down the bank to check them out. along the way we got distracted by some blood and fur in the snow and ended up starting an investigation that involved kicking the snow a bit with our feet, to see if it was coming from something buried underneath. this continued for about 5 minutes until we reached the grass and found nothing. confused, brooke looked up and spotted, oh, about ten feet away, a MASSIVE deer carcass that somehow we had overlooked. could've happened to anyone.

it was a pretty fresh kill and we felt like we were being watched by a few wary animals as we checked it out. part of the hide had been pretty cleanly removed in one big piece and we debated for only a moment whether or not take it. we carried it by the scruff of what once was a neck out of the woods and back to our car, passing a family on the way who didn't even stare. strange.

anyways, this hide has been wrapped in two garbage bags in our chest freezer since we picked it up and we designated this week for the tanning! we have Deerskins Into Buckskins and some necessary tools courtesy of andrew & carly and last night we did the first step in the process - fleshing. this involved draping the hide over a beam made of plumber's pipe resting on our green bin (!) and pinned under a bench in the yard. then we  scraped the fat & flesh off using a tool called...a scraper. doing this at night wasn't ideal but we're on a schedule since it has to "buck" in an alkaline solution for ~3 days, to get rid of the protective mucus layer out of the hide so that oils (during the dressing stage) will be able to penetrate it.

brooke, making it happen

it's pretty physical work 

perhaps too excited about removing a big piece

i didn't know anything about natural tanning until yesterday but i've learned a few things from matt richards' sweet book. first off, it's the way the hide is tanned not that it is made from deer that makes it a "buckskin". i'll spare you all the details but basically what you are doing in the dressing stage is trying to coat each fibre in a layer of the skin with a fat, often from brain or, likely in our case, eggs, so that it becomes soft and flexible. to preserve the hide in this state, you "impregnate" it with wood smoke which coats the fibers with water resistant resins and changes the chemical structure so that the soft state of the buckskin is maintained.

richards really gets you at the beginning of the book with this sweet little factoid:

"Have you ever told a friend, "uh, that cost me a couple of bucks". Well that's because buckskin was such a common commodity of exchange in the American colonies that after the Revolution, buck became the slang for a dollar bill." NEAT!

stay tuned for more adventures in tanning. i'm going to get ryan to show me how to set up a time lapse while we're working...this should be interesting.

giant hogweed

have you heard all the fuss about giant hogweed?

brooke sent esker's caregivers (that includes me for the time being) a note about the invasive plant sometime in the spring. it was a worthy warning - exposure to sunlight following contact with the sap of the plant can cause severe burning, blindness and maybe even death. eep!

on her way home from work yesterday brooke's keen eye spotted some in a meadow, literally just down the street and around the corner from our place. she convinced katherine and i to head back there with her after dinner to check it out and it. was. HUGE! but apparently not fully grown. 

brooke spots the plant

it looks a bit like poison hemlock but is ~7.5 ft tall

she encourages us to follow her

we nervously comply!

they spot more of the durned thing just south of the one we were checking out

not being with the conservation authority, katherine might not recognize the gravity of our finding but she looks great

if you see giant hogweed, don't touch it! you can call the invading species hotline and they'll help you get rid of it.

spring time veggies

one of the many luxuries of living out here in the country is being able to have a v. v. big garden. well, we actually have many raised beds in a big bit of land (mainly dug by the family workhorse, a.k.a. dedicated gardener, alnis) because the soil is a bit cruddy, mostly clay, very wet, in need of major TLC.

watermelon starting to vine

in the fall before we had realized that we weren't going to be able to just have a big ole' garden, clay and i rented a rototiller and dug up the designated area in a bit of a rush since we were already late to plant our 4 (or 5?) varieties of hardneck garlic. fortunately the garlic made it in in the nick of time and now we are delighting in the consumption of millions & zillions of garlic scapes. more like dozens but almost too many to eat, that is for sure. scapes are the immature "flower" (apparently they aren't actually the flower but they look like they would be) stalks that are removed to encourage the plant to focus energy on the bulb. they are a bit milder than regular garlic & you can eat them raw or cooked. i think they're seriously delicious.

there are still many more to be harvested. holy scapetown batman. 

i had some last year from the farmers market and under liz's influence made these smitten kitchen biscuits using cheddar + scapes instead of blue cheese + scallions. really really delicious. i've really gotten into experimenting this year because we have so many. i've been making the salad dressing from this recipe from sarah b. using scapes instead of cloves, made pesto with almonds & parmesan, chopped them up into scrambled eggs for my pals post-party, and yesterday sauteed them in their all their curled glory to find that not only does the flavour mellow considerably with cooking, their taste & texture becomes a little like green beans!

my homegrown breaky. check out the colour of our ladies' yolks! 

pesto is not that glamourous to look at

happy canada day!

it was canada day on friday so it was also a holiday for everyone and we decided to have a big camp-out party bbq thing with a bunch of very great people. i put lights up around the barn doors so that our friend danielle's band could play a sweet & spontaneous show at dusk.

this delicious feast just kept getting bigger and bigger as guests arrived and presented their treats.

we'd been cleaning the pond for weeks before the party and the guests took full advantage.

quoits! pronounced "kwaits".

b-ball at dusk

Danielle and friends at dusk.

make no mistake, the canoe did capsize and these brave gents were thrown into the water fully clothed. Definitely a highlight.

barn stage

the necessary hilarious dance party. much Robyn was played and enjoyed.

hope you had a lovely holiday weekend, everyone!