This morning dispatched Howard and Warner to the Camp of the Saltmakes for a supply of salt. Lest it bethought this is my original idea. (You’re gonna have to work it whilst it dries to make it soft, but when you work it can be now or 30 years from now.) Rewarm the water every day for two or three days, wringing the hide pretty good before putting it back in the warm water (you’re trying to push the soap in and the grease out).Īfter about three days, either stretch it constantly until it dries, or hang it up to dry and do the hard part some day when you‘ve nothing else to sort out. Soak hide in a five gallon bucket of soapy to the extreme (like two or three bars of soap soapy) warm water. Soak the hide in water and lye or wood ashes to persuade the hair off. Absolutely nothing easier so far as I’ve seen. Bar soap, liquid soap, even powdered soap. Tried most everything, but finally settled on plain old soap. I made buckskin of many deer hides when I was young and energetic. After the smoking, i would stretch the hide once more and it would be ready for storage or trade. Finally i would make a tripod over a fire, high enough to avoid the flames and hang the hide fur side down around the frame like a teepee, then use green woods to smoke the hide for several hours. I would let the hide dry in the sun and then use a blunted and smoothed stick (3"-4" diameter) to stretch and soften the hide. After drying i would mush the brains with a dash of water until it was a lotion consistency and massage it i the hide ( if you don't have the brains, i've heard that egg yolk will work, though i haven't tried it myself). I would leave it in the sun to dry for a few days stretched on a board. Once the salt had absorbed the fat/oil from the hide, I would brush it clean, and repeat 2-3 times until the hide had a dry tacky feels to it. After scraping the hides clean, i would lay them out flat (fur side down) and generously coat them with rock salt. I’m sad that Bandit died, but I’m glad that we were able to honor her death in this small way and keep a part of her that will be useful to us, even in her death.When i lived in FL i had the opportunity to tan many deer hides. I’m trying to decide what I’m going to do with it. That’s okay though, now that it’s tanned, I can store it and finish it the next time I have the fireplace going. Otherwise, it will get hard again every time it gets wet. If it started to dry, I just got it a little wet again and kept going.Īt this point, you need to smoke it for 15 – 30 minutes to waterproof it. I rolled over the hide for 5-10 minutes every hour until I got it nice and soft. This looks like I’m rolling out the weirdest cookies ever. Then I got out my trusty tanning helper (aka the rolling pin). You can use the smaller pieces as cat toys. Make small cuts or you will end up chopping the whole thing to pieces. See how clean it is now? It’s still really wet though. It took me about 3 washes to get it really clean. The next morning, I washed off the hide really well to remove all of the dirt from the fur as well as the egg yolks from the hide. Make sure you don’t use hot water, you don’t want to scramble your eggs. The purpose of the wet towel is to keep the egg yolk mixture moist. Then you cover it with a wet towel and let it sit overnight. I smeared the egg yolks on the hide, trying to avoid the fur as much as possible. You could also use an animal brain instead of egg yolks, but… yuck. I also prepared a tanning mixture, using 4 egg yolks. Every now and then I had to use a knife, but I mostly just peeled pieces off, little by little.Īfter I got as much meat, fat, and skin off of the hide as I could, I took it inside and laid it out. It was sort of like peeling off a layer of old glue. The next day, I started peeling off the dried skin, meat, and fat from the hide. So, DH (dear hubby) skinned her and I did my best to tan the hide and make it useable for us in the future.įirst, I obtained the hide, laid it fur side down outside, and covered it in salt. It might sound a little morbid, but she died of natural causes, she is livestock, and it’s silly to waste her fur because I’m feeling a little squeamish. We decided that before we disposed of her body, we would skin her. We were all sad that she died, she was a great rabbit. Last Monday, one of our rabbits Bandit-doe, was acting lethargic and not eating.
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