Washing - soak the hide in detergent and water for several hours to remove the last of the fat/grease and any dirt, blood etc.Fleshing - with the hide draped over a log, fur side down, use blunt tools to scrape the fat from the hide.Drying and salting - leave the hide stretched out, fur side down, covered in coarse table salt (sodium chloride) for several weeks until dry.The steps we have used to attempt to create rugs are: There are many different ways to tan hides, depending on the size, the intended purpose and whether you want to retain the hair or fur. Tanning is the process of modifying the protein structure of an animal skin so that it will not naturally decompose. This is the method that we have pieced together for tanning our two steer hides: Its certainly been difficult to find a modern Australian account of tanning a steer hide. I think because there are so many different methods of tanning, its been a challenge to write about them all in one book, and this had led to very confusing instructions! There's also not one best way to do it, it will just depend on your access to resources and time. These are 'Leathercraft', by RM Williams, which is mostly about working with leather and has a small jumbled chapter on tanning at the start, and 'Tan Your Hide', which is from the US and early 70s, mostly about small hides, but has given us a few tips on steer hides. We also have two books, which are not the best references, but are better than nothing. If anyone reading this has something to add from personal experiences with tanning, please do, I'm not claiming to know everything on the topic, I'm just recording what we did. ![]() We have now tanned two steer hides, and even though I'm not very experienced, I wanted to write this because there isn't much information available on the internet on steer hides. We like to think that we are using as much of the animal as possible, and even though our first tanning attempt didn't turn out perfectly, we still use the hide cut in half, one half on each side of our bed, which is lovely on a cold winter morning! And as one of my tanning books says "every time you tan you will get a better result as you will have more experience", so we hoped that this hide would turn out better and maybe with the help of this post you will have a head-start too. Tanning a hide is hard work, so if you're going to do it, you need to be organised and prepared to put some time into it, but if you do a good job you can produce a lovely rug (or useful leather if that's more your thing). We had been putting off the job because we remembered how much work it was last time, but we finally got around to it a few weeks ago. The hide from the steer that we had butchered in June (Bruce) had been lying on the floor of our shed for several months, covered in salt and waiting for us to start working on tanning it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |