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!
Posts tagged #skin working
Peeling Oak Bark for Tanning Leather and Apple Breeding Update
Here are a couple of recent videos I did on the stuff I do around here. One is a short update on labeling and protecting fruit that was pollinated earlier this year as part of my apple breeding project. I talk a little about the breeding parents and related stuff, but it's pretty straightforward and short, with a quick visit to my new pig. The second is a follow along while I cut down, cut up, and peel the bark off of a tan oak tree that is infected with the organism involved in sudden oak death. I use the bark for tanning skins. I'm working on a book right now on tanning with plant materials like bark, various leaves and pods and stuff like that. Writing, research and experiments around that project now consume most ofmy time, energy and thought. In the video I show a few pieces of leather tanned with oak bark, peel the bark, split the wood and clean it all up. There are few things I'd rather do with my time than that type of forestry work. Splitting wood, playing with wood, using my axe, burning brush to make charcoal, etc.. is all my idea of a good time! woo hoo! It's really hard for me to cut these videos down and focus them in. There are so many satellite topics I want to talk about! Definitely some stuff coming on axe use, wood splitting tutorials, forestry and forest ecology, and lots of tanning and skin working stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNFZiu4mSts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX8g0Yt0ZmI
