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1. #Acorn sccpss shared documents forms all items skin#
2. #Acorn sccpss shared documents forms all items full#

A paraplegic piece of leather is quite nearly as useful as one with all it’s limbs. Another great source of experimental material on bigger skins is to cut off all the legs.

#Acorn sccpss shared documents forms all items skin#

You can dice that neck up into 8 or 10 pieces and try all kinds of stuff while doing a miniature run through of the process with the very same skin you will be tanning. Another option for something larger, like a deer, goat or sheep hide, is to cut off the neck and run through your process with that before attempting to tan the rest of the skin. Pick up road killed squirrels to experiment on. If you are going to experiment with tanning materials, EXPERIMENT SMALL! Even something as small as a squirrel skin could be cut into 4 to 6 pieces to test different materials. Tanning is typically a bit of a learning journey, especially using traditional natural tanning methods. Usually there are a lot of mistakes and mishaps involved in the learning process. I’ll offer some ideas on where to find materials shortly.Įxperimenting: when people first start tanning, they often bite off more than they can chew. I understand that many of you don’t have access to quality known tanning plants, but if you do, favor those over things like coffee grounds, random dead autumn tree leaves, black walnut hulls and used tea leaves. Unless there is some reason that you just find some exotic or new material especially compelling, favor known tanning materials over very experimental materials at least until you know what you are doing a little bit. Tanners have often blended materials together to insure adequate fermentation and to impart various qualities now we are getting into the realm of the real art of leather tanning which is waiting for us to rediscover.ĭon’t mess about with marginal materials if you don’t have to. You will notice that not infrequently fermentable sugar content is mentioned in the literature. The color will also vary a lot from dark brown, to pinkish, red, light tan and tending toward yellow. I would guess that most plants with enough tannin will make at least okay, useable leather for a home tanner.

All indications so far though are that those oak galls make a stiff, brittle leather. Our large oak galls for instance are easy to gather and extremely high in tanning agents. That is one reason to test multiple materials if you are forging into experimental territory with unknown plants. The quality of leather will vary with the tanning material used. An important point however is that not all plants that can be used to tan a hide are actually going to make very good leather. Even in deserts without trees, there are probably species of shrubs with high tannin contents. If you want to research a specific material more, you can use sites like and Try different combinations of keywords such and as leather, tanning, tannin, the plant’s common names and the plants botanic name (or names, plural since they often change over the course of 100 years or more in order to keep botanists employed and make them look busy).Īnother thing I’d like to point out is that this large body of information illustrates just how common tannins are in plants around the world, and that there is probably something usable where you live, even if you are not seeing it. There is still much more that could be dug up on the subject. To top it off, at the end there is a surprisingly long bibliography of publications on tanning materials put out by the USDA, with such fun topics as tannin content of some acorns, Tannin content of pacific coast trees, tanning materials in South Africa and the tanning industry of Washington state.

#Acorn sccpss shared documents forms all items full#

But I decided to list a bunch of full text excerpts on tanning materials from some other old out of copyright tanning books. That information comes largely from Howe’s book on tanning materials, which I think is still in copyright.

I had already typed up a partial list for a vegetable tanning book project that I have done some writing on which is mostly presented here (don’t hold your breath on me publishing it anytime soon). Here is a very large amount of information to address fill that gap. I am asked a lot about what tanning materials people should use in their part of the world.