And its not too bad. Its a little stiffer then I was hoping for. But for my first experience tanning a hide I am happy with it. I wound up using some neets foot oil to soften it a little more. So my goal was still accomplished because neets fort oil is made from bones and hooves. I plan on making a quiver from this hide so stay tuned for that project.
Tan the hide that is. My egg solution worked great and now I am in the softening process. This is gonna make or break the project. There's a sweet spot of time in this phase that makes the hide supple like cloth. Take too long and miss it or don't work the hide long enough till its completely dry and you'll be startin over.
Here are a pic of the hide so far. Its actually looking pretty good; i just have to keep going till its dry and hopefully i will have a nice supple hide to display.
Well this was my first experience tanning a hide the old way. And lemme tell yea I give the women of that era alot of credit. There is nothing easy about hand tanning a hide and I wasn't even making buck skin. The amount of work that goes into making a hide that one could use as clothes is amazing. It is very labor intensive when it comes to making the hide soft. I am physically spent after all the stretching and softening I did today
Ok so I now have the hide in the frame and all stretched out. Its now ready for fleshing. Which is basically removing all the large left over flesh, fat and membrane from when its was skinned out.
Oh i should let you know I have decide to use paleolithic tools to flesh, scrape, stretch and tan this hide. I'll get pic of the tools I will be using very soon, to show you exactly what I mean buy paleo.
So I've decided to finally start tanning a deer hide I had in the freezer for about a year. I will be tanning it the natural / primitive way by not using any man made chemicals. Now they way I wanted to do it is called "Brain Tanning". And it is what it sounds like; you use the brains of the animal you killed. Each animal has enough brains to tan its own hide. Except for a buffalo.
However, I have had this skin in my freezer for about a year and didn't get the brains because someone butchers it. So I will be using an eggs solution instead.