hi everyone we'll need a Tebow here with Buckskin revolution and I have been waiting
so long to carve out the time to put together a video for you guys about one of the best things
in the world and that is brain tanned buckskin so brain tanning is one of the great passions of my
life I spend a lot of time tanning deer hides to make beautiful brain tanned buckskin and teaching
people to do so and making buckskin clothes and teaching about buckskin clothing and buckskin
sewing in general so seemed really important to round that out with a nice overview of how you go
about turning raw deer skins into one of the most amazing durable comfortable breathable wonderful
smelling substances on the planet so why brain tanned buckskin well for starters when you're
interacting with it it's very easy to see that it is very different from your standard leathers so
it has an amazing smoky smell and a wonderful soft velvety smooth texture but additionally
it is way more soft and stretchy flexible and breathable than other leathers additionally it
can take getting wet and dry and wet and dry and it stands up well to human sweat whereas
most other leathers break down if they're getting wet and dry and don't do well with human sweat so
those are some of the things that are obvious about it it's beautiful color and texture and
smell and wearability but there are a lot of other things less obvious so one is that unless
you spend time in circles that are practicing ancestral skills or with native peoples in
different areas around the world probably the only leather you have encountered in your life
is tanned with the industrial process that we know of as Chrome tanning so it's using chromium salts
and chromium chromium acids to tan the hides and this is a really gnarly toxic process it involves
all kinds of heavy metals and all kinds of toxins and it's so gnarly and environmentally degrading
that it's not even allowed to be done in the you know it states we ship our tanning industry over
to other countries they don't have the in kind of environmental regulations that we have so
it's really hard on the environment really hard on the people who live anywhere around it where
all of those toxics toxic materials are being dumped really hard on the people working in the
factories having to interact with that hard on the leather it degrades the leather so that it
doesn't stand up as well and hard on you if you're wearing it where you're potentially absorbing some
of those heavy metals into your skin so brain tanning is amazing from that perspective an
environmental perspective and the fact that you can tan this at home with a minimal of tools with
all natural materials that you find around you in the environment so it's amazing on so many
levels and there's something else about it beyond all of the practical things which is just that I
feel like there's something about buckskin that is so magical for so many people and I believe it's
because all of us can trace our ancestry back to someone who wore buckskin or something very
like it in their daily life it is an integral integral part of human history learning to tan
hides is what allowed people to expand from the warm tropical areas and other places around the
climate so we owe our very existence to leather very similar to buckskin something like it was
tanned on almost every continent where you find humans and I believe that there's some part of
us deep inside that knows and remembers that that we have an ancestral memory of wearing buckskin
I wear buckskin all the time in my daily life and I have all kinds of people from all walks of life
coming up to me all the time fascinated wanting to just touch my clothes or wanting to hear more
about them because there's something about it that just draws people in so that's part of why
I'm so enthusiastic about buckskin it's the magic that upholds in its capacity to remind that's who
it is to live as humans deeply in touch with the world around us and in the process of making the
goods we need with our own two hands and reminds us that we're part of the natural world instead
of separate from it so that's why I call my business buckskin revolution it's not just that
I would love to see people wearing buckskin it's about what buckskin represents on a deeper level
and that connection to our human history and to the land around us so that my friends is why I'm
excited to share with you the process of brain tanning and hopefully get you as hooked on it as
I am so I've been tanning hides since 1995 and I'm filming this in 2019 so as of this fall it will be
50 25 years 15 25 years of tanning hides and they are still just as magically magical to me as ever
and part of that is the alchemy of watching this funky what a lot of people consider waste product
of hunting into an amazing product so I want to walk you through the different stages that
a hide goes through in order to become brain Tan buckskin so this one is obviously dried not fresh
off of the deer so we start out with a raw skin so this one was skinned and then fleshed to cut all
of the meat fat membrane that might still be on it I'm gonna go in more details and skinning and tell
you why you shouldn't ever have to have meat and fat on your hides but sometimes it happens so this
was fleshed to have everything removed besides the skin itself and then staked out to dry flat
and like this it can be stored for some time so long as you don't let the critters get to it and
by critters I mean dogs and ravening predators searching the area for something delicious but
also small things like wool mobs and hide beetles will attack buckskin so you have to store them
well so that's the first stage and then the next stage is scraping it and it's gonna require some
prepping to get it ready for scraping and we'll go into that in a later stage but then it's going to
be scraped which is removing the top layer of the skin the part where the hair grows so scraping off
the hair and the top layer what we call the grain which is essentially the shiny leather there the
shiny layer on our skin and on the outside of standard leather like boot leather and that is
going to be a substance that's going to keep the high dressing from getting into it and it's also
going to allow the hide to give and stretch and pull and breathe more so buckskin is more similar
to suede and that it doesn't have that grain layer but it's different because it stands so much
better and it's so much more soft and stretchy but so this is a hide that has been scraped fully
and then again tacked out and allowed to dry and it also can be stored for some time like this a
little bit less less vulnerable to wall mods when it's in this stage and hide beetles also tend not
to hit these hides quite as much because they don't have the protection of the hair to hide
in but still can potentially be vulnerable so here is a scraped hide ready for softening and
now here is a hide that was part way softened and then stopped and dry then this is actually
half of an elk hide so this is a substantial hide and then I cut it into two hand soften it instead
of frame soften so this has been taken a little bit further into dressing and partial softening
and then stored dry and here my friends between these two stages is where the real magic happens
so this is a softened hide so you can see look at the way it flows right it is so soft and stretchy
and luxurious and beautiful so this has been fully softened but not yet smoked so a lot of people
think that that leather is naturally a brown color because it's been either brain tan buckskin which
is smoked or barked and which dyes the hide or in the case of again most of the leather you've ever
seen in your life chrome tanned which actually turns the hides a kind of a gray blue because of
the weird chemicals in there and then it's dyed brown or yellow sometimes in the case of chrome
tan buckskin to make it look like the natural product but it's all just a farce so hides the
actual substance of skin are actually white and it's the other processes that give them their
color so this is a beautiful wonderfully soft hide but if this was to get wet it would turn right
back into hard stiff rawhide essentially because they're glues in the hide and just like any glue
like think of Elmer's white glue it can just be sitting there not tacky and then you get it wet
and all of a sudden it's a tacky glue again so if this was to get wet those glues would become tacky
and they would glue all of the fibers down hard just like happened to this one partially softened
and then let dry so in order to keep that from happening the final stage of buckskin is smoking
so we put two hides together usually or larger hide you can sew it in half and turn it into a
bag and then funnel smoke from a fire of well from smoldering rotten wood into that bag so that the
hide becomes smoked and that is what gives us its color and the smoking denatures the glues in the
hide so that it can then get wet without those glues being activated and this can be wet and
dry and wet and dry and stay beautiful lovely buckskin and this is again a finished smoked
buckskin that this one has been dyed with black walnut so here are a bunch of different stages
of heidstra processing so before we get into the steps of the brain tanning process let's
talk a little bit about the structure of animal skin and what brain tanning is actually doing so
skin is made up of all of these different long protein fibers that are microscopic and they're
all going every which way just kind of held in a loose matrix with one another and they're all
independently moving now in amongst those protein fibers or all kinds of other things there's other
proteins and there's carbohydrates and a lot of those things act as glues once they dry out so
there are three different layers of animal skin there's the grain which is the outer layer and
this is the part that's waterproofing and means that we're not going to swell up like a sponge
when we go out into a rainstorm so it keeps the inside in and the outside out and then there's
the dermis which is the middle part of the skin and then there's the membrane which is these loose
protein fibers that slowly get looser as they go between the dermis and the muscle of the animal
so the three layers are different and what we're after for brain Tan buckskin is just the middle
layer the dermis and that layer is going to be water penetrable once you remove the grain and
it's going to be really strong unlike the membrane layer so in this thin area you can kind of see the
protein fibers and here is the membrane side where the fibers are a lot looser and further
apart so what brain tanning does is it's actually preserving the skin in a state more similar to the
skin of a living animal than any other style of tanning and in fact the word tanning is
kind of a misnomer with brain tanning because the brains aren't changing the nature of the
hide what they're doing is they're getting into the internal structure of the hide and they're
depositing their fats there which means they're lubricating all of those protein fibers so that
they can slide past one another even when dry I like they did when the skin was a living skin
and had moisture keeping those proteins moving so brains are unique in that they're one of the few
fats that's actually soluble in water right most oils just form a slick on water but brains are
one thing that is naturally emulsified very small fats very small particles with natural emulsifiers
egg yolks are another thing similarly if you mix egg yolks with water they just go right into them
right you can also use a very very fine oil like a neat's-foot oil or a fish oil beaten into water
with a little bit of soap to help break it up and make it more soluble in water so when we soak the
hide in that solution because we've taken off the grain layer the waterproof layer that water can
pass through the hide and as it does so it brings those small fats with them and then leaves them
on the protein fibers there are still a bunch of glues in there though so if we just left
the hide out on its own those fats would wouldn't protect the fibers from gluing together what they
do is they make it possible for us to physically manipulate those fibers as the hide is going from
drop from wet to dry so that those glues don't set up so I like to think of it as all of these
little fibers coated in Elmer's glue and even if you grease those fibers if you just let them
sit there as they dried they would turn into a solid heart mass but if they're greasy enough
that you can keep moving them past one another as they dry then at the end you'll have a pile
of individual strings that are still loose and flexible so that's what we're doing with brain
tanning and it's not truly tanned because tanning implies a change in the actual physical structure
of the proteins and that's something that the sub does the substance that we call tannins do brains
aren't doing that the only part of the process that's actually physically changing the hide is
the smoking at the end because that's making those glues not work and it's kind of keeping
the hide the way it was when you so in that way smoke tanning is actually a more proper turn than
brain tanning so let's go through the different stages of the tanning process and I have these
broken up into several parts because it's a lot and a bit of a complicated process so take all
of these videos one at a time as you choose or altogether if you're on a mad panning frenzy