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Dec. 8th, 2011 11:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickAs facebook followers may already be aware, this season's project is a medieval style book.
Medieval texts were written on parchment up until about the 1400's. Paper didn't really take off until the invention of the printing press in the mid-1400's. Before that, parchment was da bomb.
Parchment is made out of the skins of mammals, typically sheep and calves and goats and such. You can make reasonably useful parchment out of the skins of deer, however, and that's what I'm going to do. Deer skins are readily available at this time of year in Pennsylvania because it's deer season. If you don't mind the occasional bullet hole, you can play with deer skins quite inexpensively. Here's a walkthrough of our story so far...
Step 1: Acquire deer hides. You want ones that are not attached to deer anymore. You can ask your hunter friends for their hides. You can go hunting yourself (but that's a pain in the ass, as the hides will be attached to deer). Or, you can hit up your local Deer-Processing Emporium. (I've gone over this in 2004, on a web page that is only available via internet archive at this point. Since your enthusiasm for reading about this subject probably does not extend to "trawl internet archives", I have done that for you so that I can later summarize the fun parts. Stay tuned!) This year, I got two hides from friends who hunt and four from my LDPE. The friend ones were free, the LDPE now charges ten bucks a pop (they were six apiece last time I bought some, several years ago). I figure that should be enough to make a book with, considering that these are mostly quite-nice-sized hides. There are some big-ass deer in these parts. And fat, too.
Step 2: Flesh. Remove the meat and fat from the insides of the hides. If hides are salted (as sometimes happens at your LDPE), rinse them off with a hose. If they're gross (dirty, bloody, whatever), rinse them off with a hose. I rinse both sides until the water runs clear. With a reasonably-clean hide, you're ready to remove the meat and fat from the meat-side. You do this by flopping the hide over a nice length of 3" or 4" PVC that you have well-braced and angled up towards midsection height on yourself. (My pvc pipe is about five feet long.) You hold the hide in place by lapping a small part of it over the end of the pvc and leaning against it. Yes, this does mean you will get ick on you. Wear old clothes and probably a trash-bag apron would be helpful as well. Then, you use a very dull blade (a hay mower blade works well) and you start at the neck end and scuff the meat and fat parts downward and away towards the tail until the inside of the hide is neat. The meat and fat sort of peels off. You don't "cut" anything in this step except the tail (if still attached to the hide), which you slice off carefully where it meets the hide.
A note about skinning. Typically, a deer hide will have some bits of fat and meat clinging to the inside of the hide. How much is clinging is a measure of how capable your skinner is. A deer's hide is attached to the deer by way of white stringy membrane and it can be pulled off without removing the deer muscles from the hide. (This is easiest to accomplish when the kill is still-warm fresh, impossible when the deer is frozen.) A properly-skinned deer carcass looks like he's been undressed, not like he's been attacked by Freddie Kruger -- skin comes off, muscles (the part you eat) stay on. Here's a website with pictures. Notice how clean the inside of the hide is, in the fourth image down on the page. That's what you want. Notice how intact and pretty the carcass is. That's what you want. Reality falls short of the ideal a lot of the time, though, and that's where fleshing the hide comes in. When you're fleshing, your job is to make your reality match up with that lovely white inside-of-the-hide in the fourth image.
Step 3: Buck. Bucking is soaking the hides in a basic solution (basic like chemistry... NOT acidic. The other one.) to swell up the grain and loosen the hair. You can use lye from wood ashes. You can use Red Devil lye from the grocery. You can use hydrated lime (CaOH, not Agricultural Lime) from the feed store. Pick something. I'm using hydrated lime this time, used lye from wood ashes (holy hell, that was messy) last time. I've got a trash can with a plastic bag liner. It's mostly-full of lime water. There's a limit to how much hydrated lime will dissolve in water. Put some in until it starts to collect on the bottom and you'll be fine. Put hides in, stir them, cover them (if you put a plastic bag filled with water on top of the hides, it will keep your hides submerged in the soak). Repeat the stirring daily for a week to ten days. Hides are ready for the next step when big handsful of hair pull out super easily, no discernable tugging required.
Step 4: Grain. During graining, you remove the hair and grain from your hides. For this you will return to your pvc beam and dull blade... working fur-side up for this. There is a surprising amount of hair on a deer hide. Be prepared for this in terms of mess and in terms of clean-up required. The grain is the skin-patterned top layer of the hide on the fur side. You're going to scrape it off with your dull blade. This is a lot like work but the grain should come off in pretty neat ribbons. If it doesn't, you need to buck for a day or two more.
I have four hides in the buck (including one skinned by the aforementioned Mr. Kruger) and two that are de-haired but still need to be grained (they needed another day of soak, not quite ready) tonight after work, so this is as far as we go today.
Medieval texts were written on parchment up until about the 1400's. Paper didn't really take off until the invention of the printing press in the mid-1400's. Before that, parchment was da bomb.
Parchment is made out of the skins of mammals, typically sheep and calves and goats and such. You can make reasonably useful parchment out of the skins of deer, however, and that's what I'm going to do. Deer skins are readily available at this time of year in Pennsylvania because it's deer season. If you don't mind the occasional bullet hole, you can play with deer skins quite inexpensively. Here's a walkthrough of our story so far...
Step 1: Acquire deer hides. You want ones that are not attached to deer anymore. You can ask your hunter friends for their hides. You can go hunting yourself (but that's a pain in the ass, as the hides will be attached to deer). Or, you can hit up your local Deer-Processing Emporium. (I've gone over this in 2004, on a web page that is only available via internet archive at this point. Since your enthusiasm for reading about this subject probably does not extend to "trawl internet archives", I have done that for you so that I can later summarize the fun parts. Stay tuned!) This year, I got two hides from friends who hunt and four from my LDPE. The friend ones were free, the LDPE now charges ten bucks a pop (they were six apiece last time I bought some, several years ago). I figure that should be enough to make a book with, considering that these are mostly quite-nice-sized hides. There are some big-ass deer in these parts. And fat, too.
Step 2: Flesh. Remove the meat and fat from the insides of the hides. If hides are salted (as sometimes happens at your LDPE), rinse them off with a hose. If they're gross (dirty, bloody, whatever), rinse them off with a hose. I rinse both sides until the water runs clear. With a reasonably-clean hide, you're ready to remove the meat and fat from the meat-side. You do this by flopping the hide over a nice length of 3" or 4" PVC that you have well-braced and angled up towards midsection height on yourself. (My pvc pipe is about five feet long.) You hold the hide in place by lapping a small part of it over the end of the pvc and leaning against it. Yes, this does mean you will get ick on you. Wear old clothes and probably a trash-bag apron would be helpful as well. Then, you use a very dull blade (a hay mower blade works well) and you start at the neck end and scuff the meat and fat parts downward and away towards the tail until the inside of the hide is neat. The meat and fat sort of peels off. You don't "cut" anything in this step except the tail (if still attached to the hide), which you slice off carefully where it meets the hide.
A note about skinning. Typically, a deer hide will have some bits of fat and meat clinging to the inside of the hide. How much is clinging is a measure of how capable your skinner is. A deer's hide is attached to the deer by way of white stringy membrane and it can be pulled off without removing the deer muscles from the hide. (This is easiest to accomplish when the kill is still-warm fresh, impossible when the deer is frozen.) A properly-skinned deer carcass looks like he's been undressed, not like he's been attacked by Freddie Kruger -- skin comes off, muscles (the part you eat) stay on. Here's a website with pictures. Notice how clean the inside of the hide is, in the fourth image down on the page. That's what you want. Notice how intact and pretty the carcass is. That's what you want. Reality falls short of the ideal a lot of the time, though, and that's where fleshing the hide comes in. When you're fleshing, your job is to make your reality match up with that lovely white inside-of-the-hide in the fourth image.
Step 3: Buck. Bucking is soaking the hides in a basic solution (basic like chemistry... NOT acidic. The other one.) to swell up the grain and loosen the hair. You can use lye from wood ashes. You can use Red Devil lye from the grocery. You can use hydrated lime (CaOH, not Agricultural Lime) from the feed store. Pick something. I'm using hydrated lime this time, used lye from wood ashes (holy hell, that was messy) last time. I've got a trash can with a plastic bag liner. It's mostly-full of lime water. There's a limit to how much hydrated lime will dissolve in water. Put some in until it starts to collect on the bottom and you'll be fine. Put hides in, stir them, cover them (if you put a plastic bag filled with water on top of the hides, it will keep your hides submerged in the soak). Repeat the stirring daily for a week to ten days. Hides are ready for the next step when big handsful of hair pull out super easily, no discernable tugging required.
Step 4: Grain. During graining, you remove the hair and grain from your hides. For this you will return to your pvc beam and dull blade... working fur-side up for this. There is a surprising amount of hair on a deer hide. Be prepared for this in terms of mess and in terms of clean-up required. The grain is the skin-patterned top layer of the hide on the fur side. You're going to scrape it off with your dull blade. This is a lot like work but the grain should come off in pretty neat ribbons. If it doesn't, you need to buck for a day or two more.
I have four hides in the buck (including one skinned by the aforementioned Mr. Kruger) and two that are de-haired but still need to be grained (they needed another day of soak, not quite ready) tonight after work, so this is as far as we go today.
