Processing White tail hide into (part III) ... grain off bark tanned leather!

Well folks, after a long while ... I'd say I've finished with the WT hide! Sorry or the long wait, ladies and gents ... spring kinda sprung unexpectedly here and I got busy starting seeds for the vegetable patch!

After about 60-ish days in the tea (I've also added some spruce bark tea to get the more golden highlights and the preservative qualities) the hide was taken out, washed in mild soap (in a washing machine, if you must know!) and rinsed.

 

Dove body soap (1/3 cupful) with a squirt of betadine surgical scrub.

 Let the hide drip off the excess water, and in the meantime, make yourself some leather mayo. Again, I'm using 1/3 liquid soap and 2/3 olive oil to make 1 cup of leather mayo emulsion.                                    

Just so it can cover the hide, I've diluted it in half a litre of WARM (not hot) water. Work, agitate, pummel, massage, rub, stir, etc for 30 minutes. Kinda wring it the best you can, let it drip off excess dressing, then repeat the work/agitate/pummel again. Then let it sit in the dressing for an hour.

After an hour, take it out of the dressing and let it drip off the excess overnight.

After dressing the hide, I folded it and plonked it in the freezer overnight. Took it out the next day, let thaw outside (8 deg C in the sun that day) let it dry off excess moisture from drippy slippery hide to just damp, and let it freeze outside at night, and prepare to work it the next day.

Even with all the holes and missed grain patches, it looks pretty darn good.

After letting it freeze dry overnight, it still contained a fair amount of water in it. Think of a bath towel after a trip to the swimming pool. Not sopping wet, but it is heavy with moisture. Here's where you'll need a fair amount of OCD ... softening a hide can take upwards of 8 to 12 hours of working it! Of course, you don't have to do it all in one sitting --- roll it up and put in a plastic baggie and into the freezer when you're done for the session.

The hide contains just enough moisture that it WON'T freeze solid - more like a very stiff pair of un-broken jeans. For working the hide, I lashed a canoe paddle onto the deck's steps and used the edge. You can also lace the hide onto a frame and work it with a paddle in your hands -- but I like to be able to rub n' fluff the hide in my palm in between edge working. Plus a hide on a frame won't fit in a freezer all that well .....

Just so I have a quantifiable way to determine the "dryness" of a hide, I weighed it before working, and after working. Once the weight stabilised, it is truly dry! I cannot emphasise how important it is to work the hide till it's completely dry -- most people stop working the hide too soon, and as the fibres dry out (without movement) it'll harden into stiff, plank-like quality! Good rule of thumb is to continue working for another hour when you think you're done ... or until the weight stays constant.

After 2 hours of working ... 1.362 kg

After 6 hours of working .... 0.743kg. Nearly half of it's original weight was water!

After 8 hours of working ... only 3g difference. Yup it's dry. Bear in mind that you also scrape a heck
of a lot of membrane off the hide when you work it ... so you'll lose maybe 2-3 grams of fibres per 2 hours.

Once it's dry, I change technique ... and used a deer scapula for finishing. The way I do it is to sit on half of the hide, lift the edge with my left hand until you have a bit of tension, then use the scapula in my right hand to scrape/fluff the stubborn areas like the back, neck and edges into the softness I want - in this case as soft as a broken in denim fabric feel, as I'm thinking of making a quiver and bow case.

It's funny how well the deer scapula fits in my hand and works so well to fluff up the fibres!

 

 

Once you've got the degree of softness you want (of course, if it's still not soft enough, you can always use a spray bottle to re-dampen it and rework), it's time to finish off the flesh side with a pumice stone. Working on an edge kinda make the fibres a bit rough on the flesh side ... so to make it smoother out comes the pumice stone. Drape the hide on your thigh (flesh side up) and rub lightly with pumice stone until it's smooth. Don't over pumice - or you'll make a hole in the hide!

Rough un-pumiced on the top half, smooth silky suedey pumiced on the bottom half.

Yeaa ... I kinda fail at graining the hide because I used a kukri (hence the holes) and missed a few patches on the grain side, but these patches just scrapes off easily with your fingernails after softening ... and kinda adds an interesting character of light coloured patches.

Grain side. Nice golden brown with the odd light tan patches from bad graining.

However, the flesh side looks amazing! Maybe I should finish off the grain side with the pumice stone, too, to even the surface a bit more.

Silky suede smooth!

Soft enough to sew without pre-punching with an awl, yet stiff enough to hold it's shape once sewn into ...
dunno yet. Quiver and bowcase, maybe?

The trimmings are not wasted either. They'll make fantastic ammo or coin pouches. Maybe a deery something for my niece.

So my verdict? For my First Ever Hair Off, Grain Off, Non-Commercial Chemicals Involved Tea Tanning ... definitely do it again. Need a bit more practice in degraining (a proper drawknife would help!) to stop poking so many holes in it ... but yup, B+ for this hide!

Deer hock pouch iteration 3

Deer bone button

Twisted tea tanned leather strap

Nearly done

Running seam for attaching strap to side of pouch

Bone button on leather cord, with glass beads

Tea tanned leather Button loop on the flap.

Very BLING name panel! Glass seed beads on tea tanned leather

Taaa daaa! Be the envy of your friends

OK I suck at beading. Hahaa

Processing White Tail deer hide into ..... [part II]

Here we go again! I'll actually let the hide decide for me what to do with it.

After several days in the borax + water bath, out to the back garden it goes, for some dehairing process. Whether or not I degrain it depends on the skin. But before we start, we need to get a beam set up. Since I'm quite the short bastard, the beam is quite small, made out of old futon frame and a 7.5 cm diameter (3 inches) PVC pipe, of about 1.2 meters length.

The wooden base where the pipe slides onto.

Right, so we get the hide, wash it and rinse it one more time. Bath tub works just fine...

Let the excess water drain off. Then take it outside. Taking hair off a deer hide is messy, so unless you want to get banished from the house, do it outside!

Drape the deer hide, hair side out, on the PVC pipe. Lean into the top of the beam to secure the hide between you and the PVC, then push down with a blunt knife.

The hair and grain layer should come off. Be patient, though, as you can easily tear into the skin! I know I did, quite a lot of times. Need to make me a draw knife, I guess.

You can see the roots of the hair in the grain layer. scrapey scrapey!

Well, for my first try in dehairing (without chemicals) and graining with a blunt-ish knife (obviously not blunt enough!) 6 hours work ... results in a swiss cheese deer skin. Meh, I can always restitch the holes ...

Two bin bags full of deer hair! Left out a handful for the birds to use in spring.

Well, obviously I need a bit more practice in dehairing and degraining! Anyway, for a 1st full sized hairless skin, I guess I did better than most LOL.

On the plus side, the little piece of dehaired and degrained belly skin turns out to be a real nice piece of suede-like leather:

grain side - soft suede-y texture

Flesh side. Might tidy it up a bit with sandpaper.

Velvety soft! Almost buckskin, considering I used tea to Saami tan it.

Squishy soft, like velvet! Sometimes the best things comes in small packages! If I can make the rest of the dehaired and degrained skin into this something like this test piece, I'll be one very happy Musang!



Deer hock pouch
Deer hock pouch, iteration 2; with belt loop
How to skin deer legs for hockskins
Bark tanning hair on deer hide
How to remove the pasterns and coffin bone from a deer foot
Salt Curing deer hides for storage
How to degrease deer bones for making tools
Soap/Oil tanning hoof-on, hair-on, Mule Deer hockskin

Processing a White Tail buck hide into .... [still undecided!]

Got a bit tweaky (bored and restless) so I decided to thaw out the white tail buck hide that's been sitting in the freezer for a couple of months. This time I'm attempting to process and tan it without salt curing the hide, just to properly document it.


Fleshing the Hide

There's a reason why leather work and butcheries in various cultures are usually relegated to the lowest castes; it can be a very gory process complete with excessive slathering of blood, tissue fluids, bodily goo, and if you're unlucky enough to work with a less than fresh hide, the perfume of putrefying flesh.

Be thankful for small mercies, that's my advice. A freshly thawed hide (provided you freeze it as soon as you skinned it off the animal) does not smell nasty. It does still, however, have a lot of fresh tissue goo, blood, etc. which is one of the reasons I prefer to salt cure a hide and let nature do it's work for me in breaking down the icky stuff.

Ideally, one should use a flesher beam and a proper fleshing tool. I am a great believer in the K.I.S.S principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid!) so all I used for fleshing this critter was my good ole knife (the edge dulled with use)  and a 2x2 piece of cedar. Works fine once you know the technique.

Just use the dull-ish edge to get a working edge of the membrane and "push" it off the skin. How dull should the knife be? Dull enough that you don't cut your own skin if you run the edge on your hand. This is so you can apply a lot of pressure on the hide to move the goo but not cut the skin.

Short break is needed!

There, all clean. All it takes is a dull knife, a piece of wood with rounded edges and a lot of goo scraping for 90 minutes

WASHING and DRYING

Then the fleshed and de-membraned hide is washed to get rid of most of the blood and surface goo, and clean the fur of "pollution". Don't worry too much about getting the rest of the goo out. It'll come out easier when you soak it later for dehairing. Once "kinda" clean, dry it out as soon as you can before anything has a chance to rot and stink.

In the meantime, I trimmed a piece of belly skin with the hair on to see what's the best way to "slip off" the hairs without using special chemicals.

So into the bucket of room temperature water, with a bit of borax added in (just to cut the oils)

In the mean time, the rest of the hide is loosely framed so that the edges dry properly without curling up.

Bamboo needle makes things so much easier.

Laced up in a warm, dry, lotsa air circulation place.

Cat likes to sit under the frame and pretend it's a Lean to

SOAKING AND DEHAIRING/GRAINING

Back to the belly skin in the bucket, 3 days later.....

The hair has started to slip! Using the same method as "fleshing", you can easily scrape off the hair AND the grain layer in this particular piece. If you're planning to bark tan the skin, leave the grain on. Of course, you can bark tan a grain off skin, but it'll be less water resistant. The grain helps the leather to repel water naturally.

For making buck skin, the grain is taken off. Once soaked for 3 days, the grain and hair just slides off with a blunt edge. No nassssty chemicals like Ca(OH)2 is needed, really, but if you like to have things easy, sure, lime it. Just make sure you rinse and neutralised all the lime outta the hide afterwards.

Re-scrape the flesh side while you're at it. Lotsa Hide Snot oozes out of the fibres in the soaking.

Once scraped mostly off the grain and hair, and removing superfluous Hide Snot, wash and rinse to get a wet sheet of unprocessed deer skin. Just for the hell of it, I just plopped this wet skin into a tub full of tea (yes, as in tea leaves).

Look! Alien Goo!

Tannin turns Alien Goo into partially tanned leather.

In the meantime, the rest of the hide on the frame has dried, so it was unlaced and stored for the moment while I debate with myself on whether to bark tan or brain tan the rest of it!

Gigantic Deer Jerky!

TO BE CONTINUED .....



Deer hock pouch
Deer hock pouch, iteration 2; with belt loop
How to skin deer legs for hockskins
Bark tanning hair on deer hide
How to remove the pasterns and coffin bone from a deer foot
Salt Curing deer hides for storage
How to degrease deer bones for making tools
Soap/Oil tanning hoof-on, hair-on, Mule Deer hockskin