By my reckoning, the new year began at dawn on 12/22. But, I suppose it’s NYE today.
I wasn’t slash am not satisfied with the custom deer hide for the young hunter. I just couldn’t get the stiffness out of it no matter what I did. So, I took a closer look at my neatsfoot oil – the oil I used in my soap solution to dress it for tanning – and here’s the thing:
Continue readingWhat an actual joy to create this with my guy, my bff & husband.
David and I have had this in the works for about a month now. Amazing to get anything done with an almost-6- month-old, while he works full time, I run a business part-time and also tan hides, and we somehow both also manage to keep our house habitable, etc.
If you’ve got a couple successful seasons of fat and smoke tanning behind you, this little book probably isn’t for you. But if you’re a new beginner, just getting started with tanning, done some hides but want to do better, or just curious, you might get a lot out of it and love it, too.
Available on my Etsy.
My version of church.
5:30 pm, 32* Fahrenheit.
The deer skin before smoking: looking good! No further hair loss, fairly supple, decent drape. I scraped it a bit on my beam with my mezzaluna, to remove the dry alum and soften it a bit more.
Then it was time to smoke it.
No pictures after this point in the process because guess what? My phone died.
I also smoked the egg yolk-dressed sheepskin, and re-smoked a small shearling just for the hell of it (and to add more color).
I used the last of my punk maple, which I forgot to take pictures of.
The smoking took about two hours.
Continue readingThe deer hide is fine!
It lost a bit of hair to slip, but it’s mainly undercoat and not visible from the front unless you’re looking closely in the right place.
I gave it a brushing today so I could assess the “damage”, but really, it’s going to be just fine.
So there’s my reminder that alum is it!
I’ll be tawing my other 2 deer skins after I get this one and the sheep smoked.
After that, I may put my little tannery to rest for the winter. These very cold months aren’t the best for tanning, and this issue with the deer reminded me of that. This work is seasonal and I need to respect that. Especially without having my woodstove hooked up in the workshop.
I have a small (grateful it’s getting smaller) inventory of tanned skins for sale, and I’ll pick up with my 2 deer, and the last 2 sheep from ’19 when the weather starts breaking in (let’s face it) April.
While working (hand stretching, breaking with ulu) the deer hide in my house last evening, I noticed more hair than usual had “shed”. Then I realized it wasn’t the usual, minimal shedding that deer hides do – it was slip.
Hair slip or slippage is what we call the hair/fur/wool falling out of a hide when we don’t want it to. It’s a result of bacterial activity & decay in the epidermis, and means that the hide is not properly preserved or tanned yet.
In this case, my mistake has been keeping the hide in my warm home while also trying to dry it slowly. The hair is slipping a bit where the skin is still not dry – where it’s also the thickest – between the shoulders.
To try to keep the hide from drying too quickly between stretching sessions I’ve been rolling it up. Probably a fine idea at 45 or even 50*, but we’ve managed 67* in my home recently and that’s too warm to be mixing with damp.
The hair loss is not visible – yet. I hope it won’t be. As soon as I realized what was happening, I moved the hide back out to the extremely cold garage (it went down to single digits last night) and laid it out flat.
I also poured some alum on the center part, on the skin side where it isn’t dry. Tawing with alum is a step I usually include automatically in my tanning, but didn’t with this skin for 2 reasons: I taw in an alum pickle which would have meant submerging the hide in water when it was too cold for water to remain liquid, and because I thought I’d be processing the hide fast enough to not worry about slip.
So. I think the dry alum will prevent any further hair slip. I’d rather have a hide stiffer than usual than with bald patches. And I’d like to get this guy smoked in the next couple days. However, it’s 8* with negative 20 windchill out there right now. No smoking today!
The goal now is to smoke him on Wednesday or Thursday, which is 2 or 3 days from now, if the forecast for highs in the upper 20s/30s holds true.
Learn learn learn! It’s what I do. It’s what this process is. Every hide is truly different. The environment you tan hides in, like a river, is never now as it was before.
This may have been my last above 35* day for many months, and would have been nice for smoking a couple skins, but the deer just isn’t ready.
That’s one of the things I like about this work: it forces me to slow down, to do things not at my will but in their due time.
I can’t control the weather to make a hide dry faster. I can bring them into my warm home, but the other side to that coin is that I don’t want them drying too quickly or they may lack suppleness.
If the snow that’s predicted to fall tonight sticks around, then I’ll just smoke hides in the snow. When they’re ready.
Meanwhile, I have been alternating scraping and stretching the deer hide in my workshop and my home.
As always, the white parts are dry and the blue parts are still wet.
Last night’s work on the deer:
Deer skins, in my experience, dry faster and harder than sheep. I think this is because of the insulating factor of wool – even though it’s only on one side of the skin, I think it hampers air flow.
Another thing on my mind recently – how’s that for a transition – is that the colder weather will give me opportunities to harvest roadkill. There may be some buckskin or bark-tanned deer hides in my future. If I’m lucky, some nice winter furs from unlucky raccoons. And if I’m really lucky, a fox.
9:25 pm. 43*.
Tonight I had just enough time to get another round of tanning dressing on the custom deer. It had dried nicely under salt, especially after I rolled it up and brought it into my house overnight.
I started off by scraping off the salt.
I made my soap and oil dressing a bit thicker this time, by using less water. I remembered that it used to be thicker.
Continue reading
Soap & Smoke 