Quality Hide Glue From Scratch, #6, Part 2, Cutting and Drying

Here ya go.  I just love the way this glue turns out!  It's pretty fun to sit around and sift my hands through it :DWhen I was first taught how to make hide glue it was always a cloudy stinky mess.  Then I started poring through old technical manuals.  Now my glue looks like a pile of little gems.  There will be one or two more installments coming in this series eventually.  Hey, you may not want to make hide glue now, but I'm building an archive here.  Mark my words, the further people are divorced from reality by an increasingly industrialized society, the more artists and craftspeople will tend to go back to the roots of materials and production.  It's already happening more and more, I'm just ahead of my time.  If I can convince even a few woodworkers to make this amazing glue for themselves and use it or one person to go into production to make small batch artisan hide glue, It will have been worth putting out this series.  You can find videos and stuff on making hide glue, but probably none from the ground up with an eye to high quality, but that's how we roll here- top shelf ya'll.  When the zombie apocalypse comes, you won't be able to go to the pet store to get a rawhide chew toy.  And we don't want to let all that zombie skin go to waste!

Video Series on Making Quality Hide Glue

I'm shooting a video series on making high grade hide glue.  At least that is the goal, we'll see when I test the glue after it's finished, or maybe have it tested by someone else.  The third video, on liming, is uploading to YouTube as I'm typing this.  The approach is a sort of learn as you follow along kind of thing, going through the process of turning a cattle hide from Tamara's recent cattle processing class into hide glue.  Every time I go to work on the skin, I take some video and edit it down.  One section is sort of a lecture type deal with some chalkboard action, one is on fleshing and, aside from the liming one uploading now, the others will be de-hairing and de-liming, cooking and pouring, then finally cutting and drying.  Maybe at some point there will be one on testing the finished glue.

This hide glue series will be fairly long, but there are things in there to learn beyond making hide glue.  Little snippets about other stuff relating to tanning skins and such inevitably work their way in.  No process is an island after all.  So far these videos have been decidedly lacking in popularity and the total number of people that really get a lot out of this will probably not be that many.  But it will be there when people are ready for it, and that is most of the reason I do this stuff at this point, as a reference archive and so it doesn't all die with me one day.  Personally, I think it's really cool, even though I've so far mostly restrained myself from going on long tangents about multiple related processes and ideas.  Poking around looking at other hide glue videos on youtube, a lot (or most?) of them use rawhide chew toys cut up in pieces.  Nothing wrong with that in context I suppose, but that has never been what we, or the genesis of Paleotechnics, has ever been about.  I'm definitely bringing you something closer to the ground up version.

The link below goes to the main Playlist into which all videos in the series will be placed as they come out.  I think anyone with any kind of google account, like Gmail, can subscribe for updates.  My channel, for now, is a mixed bag of stuff I get up to.  I'm also currently also doing a series on amateur apple breeding, which will follow my progress over the years attempting to breed up some new red fleshed apples here at the Turkeysong experimental homestead.  For the hide glue series,  I'm in the dehairing/refleshing/deliming process now, so that one should be up soon.  When finished, I will probably sell the glue on Etsy.  If that works, maybe I'll add artisan hide glue making to my list of little income sources.  Artisanal hide glue for artisanal artisans, you know instrument makers, fine artists who use traditional materials, fine woodworkers that want their furniture to be fully repairable in the future and the likes of them.  People who are keepin' it real!  See ya...

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