Learning the ancestral skill of sheepskin tanning

(self taught, always)

Dear friends, we are on vacation & I am so happy! I have been writing this sub for the past few mornings in the sea air because I have felt called to share a bit about this story with you. I have so many amazing memories & milestones on our homestead since 2017 I don’t know how I will remember them all well enough to be able to share it with you but I will do my best!

Firstly, thank you to the amazing Mel for being a paid sub! A few more people like you around here & I will be able to plant more trees for the future, feed my pig GMO free corn & possibly invest a little in some new much needed footwear for the farm seeing as all my boots are broken.

As you are all probably aware, it is almost impossible for us kids born in the nineties to get a mortgage in the UK for the past 10 years or so , unless you are lucky to have support from your family or a job that pays well enough to allow you time to save this kind of money. This is one of the big reasons we decided to move to Portugal.

I have told you a little bit about my year or so of love with my bottle lamb Misty, who had a great 18 months of life before she passed in her sleep one October morning a few years back. I seriously regret not skinning her as well, but it was not something I had done before. When she died I was a bit in shock & we had some guests so it was quite dramatic & I felt too sad about it to cut her open.

I have such fond memories of that sheep, it was an incredible experience & it gave me so much confidence in myself & my abilities to nurture, give care & grow. It was probably the closest I have been to being a Mother as I had to bottle feed her every few hours & I slept with her on the sofa while Marlley got to starfish in the bed. The overwhelming possibility of having a child, it fills me with excitement & also a sense of dread, I still need a few more years to learn & grow & become a better version of myself I think.

Wasn’t she just the sweetest thing!!!!

When we decided to kill the other sheep & use her meat I was very excited to have a go at tanning the hide because I adore wool. I still have bin bags full of Mistys’ wool waiting to be processed & spun some day. This obsession with the fiber is quite new, I would say that I probably did not even give it a second thought when I studied fashion. When I studied there was not much emphasis on the importance of using natural fibers, slow fashion, hand made - it seemed to all be focused on “high” or “fast” fashion & I was wearing a lot of polyester. When I was younger I dont think I ever had clothes made from real wool but when I started to travel & I moved to Australia I discovered that they do value wool, UGG boots are commonplace there because they are so well insulated you can wear them in cool or warm weather. You definitely want to get yourself a pair of merino wool socks for those cold nights sleeping in the van in the South Island of New Zealand, thats for sure! New Zealand also has a lot of wool clothing being worn & being sold when we were there.

Wool is such a beautiful & valuable product that mostly is disregarded, you see it piled up on the side of the road when the sheep are shorn, it’s tragic I think. Nowadays you find people using it in all kinds of ways - to insulate their homes & even to mulch their garden beds, I have done both of these :D

My favourite Portuguese brand that are dedicated to spreading the love for wool is Rosapomar, she recently posted on Instagram about how we need to use wool in our homes & our clothes. If you are looking for high quality Portuguese wool, excellent courses, kits, patterns & books then please check out her website.

ROSAPOMAR - find her website here

So this is basically how I tanned my first sheepskin & made my first ever rug on the homestead.

STEP 1 - skinning the sheep

So, I am full of adrenaline having just experienced my first ever animal slaughter ( not sure of a nicer word for this? slaughter sounds pretty crazy doesn’t it ) & bear in mind that I actually really adored this sheep, she was so sweet but it felt like the right thing to do, therefore I was not going to waste anything from this animal & I wanted to honour her by keeping the skin for a rug for our tiny house when it is finished. I helped to peel the skin away from the flesh, it was the craziest thing, it literally peels right off with the help of a super sharp knife. It is like it is designed to just come away from the meat, I suppose to make it easier to eat right, it does make sense but here I am having my mind blown by this carcass.

I don’t need to tell you about all the details of the butchering right here but I learnt a lot that day, I helped to divide the meat into the correct cuts, I removed the head myself & I got to take home with me a big bag full of mutton.

STEP 2 - salting the hide

This is not a step by step so that you can do it for yourself but I am just telling you exactly how I did it & how it came out. I definitely made mistakes & it could have come out a lot nicer but I am still happy with the result. Firstly, this was in the dead of Winter when the air was very damp & cold, which does not make good conditions for curing the hide. Because of this I could not use the brains for the tanning process because we had no place to store it, the wild took care of the head for me, it was gone the next day. I poured salt all over the sheepskin & wrapped it up in itself for 6 weeks before the weather improved & I felt ready to get to work on the task of cleaning the skin.

STEP 3 - cleaning the fat & tissue away

You have to remove as much of the fatty layer as possible & anything that is still damp. The salt kept the skin wet but made sure that it did not rot, it was quite amazing actually because I did not know that this would be the case, it was kind of a play it by ear situation. I just salted it & hoped for the best! I nailed the hide to a pallet & stretched it out to the size it would be once dried. I scraped the fatty layer away slowly over the period of about 3 days, it is certainly a harder task than it looks to be. I also managed to make a few holes in the skin which I was not so happy about, but it is all a learning process.

I figured that you basically want just the very light skin left below the wool, if you scrape too hard you will make a hole but if you don’t scrape enough off then it has the possibility to rot before it is cured.

STEP 4 - tanning

I am so grateful to Ana for her advice when I got to this stage of the process as I asked her a lot of questions on Instagram because she is the master of traditional skills, ancestral artworks & all of this beautiful stuff that I had no clue about but felt so drawn to. I did not have the head of the sheep to use the brains so I chose to use egg yolks & olive oil ( both harvested from our land, which gave me such a deep connection to our home & the land during this process )

Find Ana’s website with her work, information & tutorials at the link below

“Book suggestion about Hide Tanning

If you’re interested in learning more about natural tanning in general, I suggest you check out Lotta Rahme’s book “Traditional Tanning: Leather and Furskin“. This book is like a tanning bible to me and, even though it’s not very big (about 100 pages), it’s incredibly packed with valuable information! It covers the prehistory/history of tanning, knowledge of different Indigenous Peoples, different methods (fat tanning, bark tanning, pelt tanning), tools, dyeing, curing… and more! Her book is just amazing 😊”

ANA WILD CROW

I rubbed the yolk mixture & softened the skin with it, massaging it in as much as i could. It was a strange squishy texture when it absorbed into the skin, it felt really odd on my hands. I used a river stone to rub it in more & soften the skin up a bit so it did not become rock hard when it dried. Basically did this a few times over the course of a few days & left it to air dry in a place not in direct sunlight.

I could almost feel the women who lived on this land before me, hearing them talking as they tanned hides & leather for clothing for their husbands & their children. It was such an amazing & blissful experience that I am looking forward to doing it again in the future. I find that this place we live is so rich in history & has so many stories of the people who came before us it is hard not to want to form a connection with them somehow, learning their way of life, practicing their traditions, undoing all that society has done to us so far in this life to be able to reconnect to the Earth & to nature & to realise that we are all one, not that I am a singular one. It is a hard thing to get my head around & I am not the best writer so I don’t know that I actually explain it so well, but I hope that you understand me.

This is the traditional music from Monsanto & Portugal, I could almost hear this going through my mind when I was tanning the skin. The music is usually played with the adufe, I actually have my own adufe, I should learn how to use it :D

Now the hide is wrapped up safely in storage waiting for our tiny house to be built so that we can celebrate her life with a beautiful hand made rug on the floor. I am looking forward to reading a book on a cosy Winter morning with my toes on the rug, next to our wood burning fire.

Right now it is super hot, sunny & full Summer so I won’t think about cosying up next to a fire too much!

Have a great weekend, please like, subscribe & share this sub with anyone who you think might like to read it, I am always here to answer any questions so feel free to leave a comment :)

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KO-fi

thank you for being here

Jaymie