Sheep Skins

Lynx had asked me to get a few sheep hides to use for the tanning classes so I hooked up with Eors and we went to Peter's place. We ended up slaughtering two of the sheep ourselves, which went really well. After killing the sheep and bleeding them we skinned them nicely and gutted them before hanging them under the car port. It took us about an hour to do the first one but we were quite a bit faster with the second one. Peter seemed to be happy with us for handling all of this nicely.

Then, the people he had hired to slaughter the rest of his sheep commercially showed up and they were a different breed of folks! They ended up running after the sheep, trying to corner them in their enclosure, and shooting them at a distance. It was a very different experience than what we had just done ourselves. On top of that, they did a quick, dirty job at skinning the sheep and the skins ended up with several big holes and score marks. Nonetheless, we took the skins and I hope we can turn them into something functional.

Back at home I fleshed all the skins, which was not as bad as I expected. Domestic animals tend to be very fatty, which makes the skinning and fleshing a lot harder, but these guys were not too bad. Afterward I salted the skins well and put them on a pallet at an incline so they can drip for a bit. I'll wait until warmer weather comes back to tan and wash them. They should make really nice rugs!