deerskin to buckskin, part 5: softening & abrading

part 5 took place on the same day as part 4, and brooke & i were pooped by the time it was time to soften. while clay, alnis & the other boys played quoits and swam, we busted ass in the heat & deer flies of a waning day. softening the hide involved st-st-stretching the hide any way we could - across our knees, on top of tables, standing on one end and pulling the other and constantly working the edges by rolling them out with our fingers and abrading them against a cable we set up in a spruce at the front of our property. the cable also served to abrade other parts of the hide and make it super duper soft (some places).

brookie, going for it, letting loose

not much to see but my biceps are flexed to the max here

we gave it our best effort but it was very hard work and if i'm going to be honest with you, i'll have to tell you that we have a few crusty spots on the finished product! this is mostly because those parts dried before we were able to really stretch and abrade them. the softening process has to be constant after you start because once the hide dries it can be really hard to get back into it without going through the soaking process again. constant meant no supper or swimming until we finished around 9:30 pm. oy!

the sun began to set, we began to fade

a bit worse for wear but here we are with the ole' hide, dying for a swim and supper

so here it is! our hole-y holy hide, not quite finished but done enough for now. in order to have it turn that beautiful tawny colour of most buckskins, we still have to make a punk fire and smoke it. this also will water proof it a bit and keep it from going hard if it gets wet.  hopefully we'll get that done sometime in the next few weeks and then...onto moccasin making!

sigh, what an awesome experience.

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 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.