Processing hides

[Carla D]

@Carla D - I used "The Ultimate Guide to Skinning and Tanning" by Monte Burch to get started and highly recommend it. I am an extreme fan of not letting anything go to waste including hides. Pig is MESSY MESSY work- the fat on the hides is sometimes difficult to remove. But cattle/deer- you can do well to craft something for yourself with it or others. Make a nice rug with a cow hide, or a vest with two deer hides?

I will tell you that chicken feathers can make good dream-catcher decorations, or even sometimes centerpieces. Rabbit's feet- people will occasionally buy as necklaces. Even the tails- I had a lady buy them for cat toys once! BUT, those who do buy random things like that are rare at sales. I've had someone come through and randomly buy every squirrel hide/tail I had one day, but every other time people would frown and wonder why in the world I had them. (people occasionally use squirrel tails for fishing fly lures)

Thank you. I’ll look for that book. I love the idea of not letting anything go to waste. Rabbit feet and tails, goat tails, and pigs ears are all things that I could do stuff with. We have indoor and barn cats, there are several dogs in our family. And if I got super brave, I could try some pig hides. That could always be dog treats for our own use. We cut up a fresh road kill buck a couple of months ago. We didn’t toss out any of the bad meat. We cut it up, made small bags of meat and froze that. We have been feeding that to our barn cats for the last couple of months. We try to find uses for every part of what we kill and clean.

 

[HomesteaderWife]

@Carla D - I made a thread on tanning if you're interested!

 

[Carla D]

@Carla D - I made a thread on tanning if you're interested!

Most definitely be checking that out out. Thank you so much.