Traditional Moose Hide Tanning - Part 1

As I was saying I took a traditional moose hide tanning course. It was great but incredibly physiscal and work intensive.

Here are some photos:

The very start is stretching the hide on the frame. As an aside I have to add that the hide stretches quite a bit over the process so pulling on the ropes and re-stretching the hide.

 At this point the super work intensive process of "fleshing" starts.
 With the tools below you scrape the flesh and a membrane below it off the hide.

you flesh the hide keeping it wet. The next process requires for it to  be dry, and this is why tanning is best done in spring or summer. Several times the hide has to be dried and we had more and more problems trying to dry them as the weather was getting worse and worse. First drying (below) the sun was still out and that went fairly well.

Then you scrape the hair off... all the way to the follicle, everything has to go or later on it creates problems.

This is the the home-made tools we used.

This is what the scraped hide looks like, very much like the type of hide you see on drums I thought.