Not sure what you’ve been up to, but around here a lot has been happening. As such, I’ve had to think for a moment about what I wanted to post for this month. Normally, I try to choose a project I’m learning that I’ve found fun or something useful that would be helpful for others. . . but this month, hands down, my favorite thing has been the fact that I finally got the podcast published!
I’ve been working on it for awhile (amazing how long things take when you’re learning and have limited time to devote to them….) and I am super excited that it’s finally up. Check out the episodes on the website here or over at apple podcasts/itunes here and let me know what you think. I’d love feedback on how it’s going and any recommendations you may have for me.
As a runner-up monthly favorite, I must mention that I attempted my first cured meat this month! It’s something I’ve never done and I did a really simple recipe so it may not have been terribly interesting for anyone else, but I’ve really enjoyed reading up on meat curing and taking my initial step into it. I’m sure more on this will be covered in the future. . .
Nick LaHaise joins us on the podcast to discuss willow basket weaving. He’s been teaching at several of the traditional skills gatherings for a few years and is co-founder of the Hearth Folk School where he teaches a willow weaving class among others.
Nick became introduced to traditional skills and handcraft as an adult when he became interested in permaculture, and discovered a passion when he tried his hand at weaving while attending a traditional skills gathering. We both highly recommend skills gatherings and suggest checking out any that happen to be in your area– a link to a few in the western U.S are listed in the resource section at the bottom of this page.
As far as basketry goes, among other things we discuss: harvesting your willow– what to look for and when, drying the willow, soaking to rehydrate, mellowing, weaving the base, turning the spokes and going vertical, Nick’s suggested weaves for a beginner, splicing new weaver willows in, shaping the basket, finishing off the weavers, weaving the border, and adding a handle.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always had somewhat mediocre luck with brain tanning furs. I turn out a serviceable buckskin, but when I leave the hair on they always turn out a little on the stiff side.
Time to try a different method!
This weeks episode with Jessie Watson Brown from the Oak and Smoke Tannery covers vegetable tanning small furs! I’ve seen a number of people bark tanning fish skins, some folks bark tanning hair off hides (think “normal” leather) but I don’t personally know anyone who bark tans furs. So when I saw her post on instagram about a rabbit tanning workshop she was holding I reached out to see if she would be gracious enough to come on and talk us through the process.
Fortunately she was!
Jessie first attempted tanning a roadkill rabbit hide and it turned out as a “crunchy papery thing”, from there she moved to buckskin and it turned out “like a big bit of cardboard.” Very reminiscent of my first hides! 🙂
In regards to how much a teacher helped fastforward the learning process? “The move from cardboard, solid, things to luscious soft buckskin was instant”. It is hard to learn the subtleties of a process from books! Or possibly even audio for that matter….. Hopefully we covered it well enough for you to start, but if you want to speed up the learning process and you’re in the UK go take a workshop in person!
Why Tan Fur?
Jessie (like many of us) loves to delve into skills from our past and explore historical crafts. . .
That said, she was actually vegan when she first decided to try tanning! But she saw it as a logical way to clothe herself and took the plunge into learning to tan.
These days she still tries to make use of hides and furs that would otherwise be wasted, uses tanning as a way to honor the life and death of the animal.
Tanning also provides a way to turn what is often a wasted by-product into usable articles– she crafts with the furs she tans and sells the finished product.
Oh, and lets not forget… Tanning is fun!
Skinning and Fleshing Rabbits (& other small furs)
Skinning tip from
Jessie: “… you don’t need to use your knife as much as you may
think you do.”
If you plan on sewing it into a clothing article etc, it is helpful if it lays out flat. Plus, most skins from hunters have already been slit up the middle when they field dressed the animal. . . Go ahead and cut it up the belly side if your fur hasn’t been already.
Once you have a skin and it’s laying flat you’ll need to remove any meat, fat, or membrane on it. For a small rabbit hide Jessie uses her fingernails or a modified paint scraper with rounded corners to pull it off. You will need to be gentle with a rabbit skin so you don’t rip it!
On a larger hide
like a fox use a fleshing tool on a beam to quickly remove the
membrane.
Storing Furs
Once you have a hide
cleaned you need to decide if you’re going to tan it now or save it
until you have a batch of them to tan all at once.
If you decide to save them to tan in the future: Jessie recommends salting large hides (deer, etc) and freezing the small furs that don’t take up much space.
How To Make a Bark Tanning Solution
When you’re ready
to tan you’ll need to make a tanning solution!
The basics? Chip up something that’s high in tannin and boil it!
Jessie mainly uses oak bark and willow bark as her tannin sources since they are traditional and readily available in her area.
Here are some things to keep in mind:
It needs to be fresh (tannin will get leached out by rain, etc if left sitting outdoors)
The smaller you chop it the quicker/more tannins will leach out
You’ll need quite a bit!
For a batch large enough for roughly 5 rabbits or 1 fox, fill a five gallon (20 liter) pot ¾ up with shredded bark then top it up with water. Boil about an hour. Jessie swishes it in her mouth to see if it is strong enough– you should feel a noticeable drying and tightening effect in your mouth. Pour off the bark tanning solution into another container and set aside.
Repeat two more
times.
Each successive
reboiling of the bark will make a solution that is a little weaker,
that is ideal for tanning.
Tanning the Rabbit
Hide
Submerge your rabbit furs in the weakest solution you made (let it cool down first!) and swish them around to make sure the entire skin gets soaked. After a couple hours pour half of the solution off and replace with half of your 2nd boil tanning solution.
Keep pouring off and
adding stronger solution at regular intervals: the hide should be
entirely in the 2nd solution by the end of the first day
and in the initial and strongest solution by the 3rd day.
For a rabbit hide,
4-5 days in the tanning solution is sufficient. For a medium sized
fur aim for 7-10 days– though it can be done much faster if you
want.
Softening the Rabbit
hide
Once the your rabbit hide has been in long enough, remove it from the bark tanning solution and let it dry slightly.
Now oil the hide so it will finish out supple– simply take a palmful of vegetable oil and rub it into flesh side of the rabbit hide. Jessie suggests using lighter weight, liquid at room temperature, oils for small furs as it produces a softer more flexible leather than when oiled with solid at room temperature oils.
After it is been
oiled you can let the rabbit fur dry until it begins going white when
stretched. From then on you need to keep it in motion until it is
completely dry.
Stretch it, rub it,
move it.
Softening the rabbit hide should only take about an hour on a warm sunny day. Now go make something with it!
skillcult.com— Excellent resource, one of my favorite people to follow online (this is Steven Edholm who wrote the above book). Also check out his Youtube channel for some phenomenal stuff related to tanning.
braintan.com — Primarily a resource for buckskin, but I linked up their stuff on bark tanning.
jutulskinn.no— tannery in Norway Jessie worked at last winter
theoldway.info – the old way year course, Jessie is an instructor
oakandsmoketannery.co.uk — Jessie & Jane’s website, go book a tanning workshop if you live in Europe!
Guest expert and mead brewer extraordinaire Jereme Zimmerman
It seems like there has been an explosion in the popularity of homebrewing in recent years– unless I’ve just been living under a rock and somehow hadn’t noticed it before! More and more often I hear of folks taking up brewing as a hobby, yet for some reason it seems like everyone I talk with or hear of is brewing beer. In fact, many of them just buy a kit and use that.
Which is interesting….. but it somehow seems to be about on the same level as stirring together a cake mix from a box and calling it baking. Or assembling an Ikea chair and calling yourself a furniture builder.
I’m sure I’m missing something here, but aren’t you essentially just combining what they gave you and watching it develop? Now, that can be super interesting in and of itself– I always love to watch things transforming themselves into something edible– but it misses some of the intrigue and delight of figuring out what works, why, and accomplishing it on your own. It definitely seems like a more approachable way of getting a drinkable brew for those of us who are total beginners though!
At any rate, I was super excited for this episode to get a chance to talk with Jereme Zimmerman (author of Make Mead Like a Viking) about traditional mead making!
What is a Traditional Mead?
A simple way of thinking about it– I was interested in learning how to make mead using natural wild yeasts. Without specialized modern equipment. And without having to worry about spending a all day sterilizing my kitchen.
Essentially, I want to know how someone would have done this 100 years or more ago.
Why Mead?
I’ll be upfront, I’ve never brewed. But I love projects that result in something edible– I bake frequently (almost exclusively sourdough for the last few years), do some lactofermentation, and have been experimenting with cheeses over the last couple of years as well. And (seeing that I got an elk this year) it looks like I may be dipping my toes into curing meat in the near future. Brewing seems like a fun project that would fit right in!
For some reason beer making has never appealed to me. Admittedly, I’m probably the odd man out on this, but something about beer has never quite piqued my interest. Perhaps because it seems. . . So common?
So overdone?
That said, I’ve always been slightly fascinated by the idea of hard cider, mead and wild fruit wines– they seem more simple (to my uninitiated brain, perhaps that isn’t the case)and are just enough out of the norm to catch my attention. And talking with Jereme was just what I needed to pique my interest even more and give me a good starting point into the brewing world! Besides, I like his approach– he doesn’t have an innate fear of letting things ferment on their own to discover what they’ll do! Love it!!
I first came across Jereme via a Youtube video he did on the topic (link here). Though I had heard of his mead book before, it had danced around the edge of my consciousness and never quite made it onto my “To Read” list. After watching the video though I decided to reach out to him and see if he would be game to come on and explain mead making to us. Thanks again to Jereme for being willing to share his knowledge and passion!
Essentials of Making a Traditional Mead
1 gallon of spring or filtered water (tap water has chlorine which will kill your bacteria and prohibit fermentation, also gives it an odd flavor. Distilled water also gives an odd flavor due to lack of minerals).
1 quart of raw honey– roughly 2.5 pounds (will make a 10-12 % alcohol mead).
Getting Going With Wild Yeast
The first thing you do is dissolve the honey in warm water (don’t get too hot and pasteurize the yeast out of it). Pour it into a crock, glass jar, etc that has a large, open mouth. Next add a small handful of organic fruit– dried or fresh (raisins are Jereme’s go-to addition). This inoculates the mead with yeasts that are present on the fruit as well as stabilizes the yeast in your mead so that they don’t consume the honey and die off too rapidly. A splash of citrus juice can help balance the flavor– not necessary, but you may want to consider squeezing some lemon or orange juice into it. Cover with a cloth and put in warm corner to ferment. Stir it a couple times a day until it fizzes (about 3-5 days). If you leave it in an open container after this initial fermentation has taken place it will turn into vinegar, so at this point you will need to transfer to a container you can keep the air out of.
Fermenting/Ageing/Bottling
Siphon the mead off into a capped jug. After about a month you will see a bunch of sediment accumulating on the bottom of your jug, siphon the mead off into another jug leaving behind the sediment. Add water to bring your mead level back up to the neck of the jug. After another couple months of aging, siphon into smaller bottles– bottle it when flat or mostly flat (once you no longer see many bubbles in it). Age a few months (higher alcohol meads generally should be aged longer) but sample occasionally and drink it when you like it!
For me knowing how to make a fire is one of the foundational skills when it comes to primitive living or self reliance in general. It provides warmth, cooks your food, is a tool and friend (as anyone who has spent significant amounts of time outdoors alone knows). Many other skills you will learn will require you to have a fire or some other form of heat at some point in the process, and the ones that don’t are more enjoyable if they’re done while sitting around a campfire! And yet it is so underappreciated in today’s modern world where flame and heat is so readily available. . .
And that is something we’re going to address with this episode– Making a fire with matches is something everyone should know how to do (and is something you should understand and be comfortable with before attempting friction fire) but starting a fire by friction will make you appreciate that flame so much more. Plus, it bestows a level of confidence and belief in yourself that matches never can!
So to kick of the Folk Craft Revival podcast we’re going to discuss fire by friction– creating your first bow drill set and how to use it to start a fire!
I started my first bow drill fire 19 years ago (gads, has it really been that long??) and have practiced and built various sets over the years, but I felt like I should bring on someone who had a little more expertise than I did. Someone who does this consistently on a much more frequent basis than I do…. So I emailed Donny Dust and asked him to come on.
Donny is a wilderness survival expert, primitive skills practitioner, and the head instructor at PaleoTracks Survival School. Most of the courses he puts together are expedition style, very hands on classes that look like a ton of fun (my perspective). Leading expeditions into the mountains of Colorado has given him extensive experience in making friction fires. . . in the field, in all weather conditions, with many different materials. He’s someone that has far more experience than I do, and I had a blast talking with him.
In this episode, we dive into making a bow drill set from start to finish then follow that up with techniques for using it in successfully getting your first friction fire! Tune in to hear it all, or read below for a summary of the episode and links for anything we discussed
Material Selection &
Shaping
First off, the key is to know what characteristics to look for, not specific species–main things to keep in mind is that they should not be wet, resinous, or rotten. Also, the spindle and hearthboard should be made of soft to medium-soft woods. Here is a basic breakdown of the parts and Donny’s recommendations for them:
Bow— Should be about the length of your arm from armpit to fingertips (individualized, about 1-1 1/2 inches in diameter, and have some flex to it.
Socket/Handhold— Best made of a material that won’t burn (bone, antler, stone, etc) but a hard wood will work as well. It is flattened on bottom with a very small divot to accept the top of the spindle (divot is about the size of half and M&M).
Spindle— Slightly harder wood than hearthboard (same wood at minimum). It should be roughly the same length as the distance form pinky to thumb when doing a hang-loose sign (6-10 inches) and as thick as your thumb. The bottom is rounded off, and the top is brought to a dull point.
Hearthboard/Baseboard— Should be made from a soft wood about a couple fingers wide. You will need to flatten it (like a board). Thickness is dependent on how hard it is, softer woods need to be thicker so you don’t burn through it while trying to get a coal (1/2-1 inch in general). In shaping it, you will create a depression for the bottom of your spindle to sit in and cut a notch into it that is about 1/5 the circumference of your depression (1/5 of the pie). The notch should come almost to the center, flare out slightly at the bottom, and have very crisp/clean edges.
Coal Catcher (under the notch in the hearthboard)— Don’t use material the coal will burn through quickly (ie dead leaves). It should be sturdy, stable, durable and controllable. You don’t want to get a coal and then have it fall apart when transporting it to the tinder bundle.
Tinder Bundle— The tinder bundle needs to be dry, light, fluffy (but not to the point of falling apart). Ideally, it will be at least softball size, with a small depression in the center for the coal to sit in. It also needs to be compact enough that the coal has fuel to burn but loose enough to allow for air flow. If practicing at home, dryer lint and cotton balls are good starter materials for learning.
Technique While Using a Bow Drill
Begin in a kneeling position with your right knee down and left knee up (assuming you’re right handed) and your left foot placed on the hearthboard to hold it flat and still. Grasp the bow at one end with your right hand and place your fingers on the string to apply pressure and adjust tension as needed. The socket should be held securely in your left hand, with your left hand wrapped around the front of your left shin to stabilize it (shouldn’t have any movement here). You should be leaning forward with your chest almost on your leg and your left shoulder over the socket while applying downward pressure. Your bowing motion should be forward and back (not side-side) and you should be doing full length strokes of the bow. The hand holding the bow should stay level and even the entire time. Make sure you breathe! Continue cranking until you see smoke coming from the coal dust at the base of the notch or you see the coal glowing red.
From Coal to Flame
Once you have gotten a coal….. Remain calm! Don’t rush and cause it to break up! Stop bowing when the right hand is near the spindle. Using your left hand, grab the socket, spindle, and bow and calmly lift straight up and away. Place them to the side. Now, use your left hand to pin the hearthboard to the ground and remove your foot.
To ensure that you don’t accidentally lift up the coal with the hearthboard, hold a grass stem, wood shaving, etc in the notch above the coal with your right hand. Now slowly roll the hearthboard away from you with the left hand, the grass/shaving will prevent eh coal from lifting up. Pick up your coal catcher and transfer your coal to the center of your tinder bundle.
Once you have the coal in your tinder bundle, gently cup the bundle around it and squeeze to ensure that it contacts enough fuel. Now turn your back to the wind, and very gently blow on the coal. Don’t over do it or you can blow it out.
After the tinder has ignited, turn it on it’s side so the flame can burn up into more material and slowly add kindling (start about toothpick size). Less is more when adding wood, you don’t want to smother it. Start with material about toothpick size and work your way up to wrist thick.
Troubleshooting Tips
Brown/black dust accumulating around top of your notch or hearthboard means your notch isn’t big enough. Widen it so the dust can fall into the notch.
Squeaking indicates you are close and need to apply more pressure and increase speed.
Resources Mentioned During the Episode
Check out the following resources we talked about in the episode if you want to learn more about friction fire, Donny, or his school!
Like what you heard? Do me a favor and go SUBSCRIBE on whatever platform you prefer to listen! Then SHARE the podcast with friends and family who enjoy learning new skills!
COMING UP: next episode we discuss making mead (brewing!) in a traditional manner
