Look, I know you're not supposed to drink your tanning liquor, but I'm trying out ornamental pear bark¹, and it smells delicious, and a little sip of the dilute solution was… pretty good, actually!
Not too surprising, since a lot of the flavour of tea comes from tannins, but still I wasn't expecting it to be good!
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¹ All my materials are sourced from urban waste streams. Ornamental pear is popular in my area.
Anyway, I now have a small container of square rawhide dog treats that I'm doing a test-tan with. I've put tanning material between the layers in addition to the liquor.
The sides of this container are transparent, but I've managed to get the tanning liquor strong enough that you can't really see through it.
I'll go through the whole process more later, but for now I'm cautiously optimistic. It'll be a while before we see if this works.
Apparently the dog treats are taking longer to tan than expected. I cut off a corner and it still clearly needs the tannins to work into the middle m.
Time to cut and boil some more bark, I guess. If I have the energy I'll scrape them a bit more to work out some moisture and clean the flesh side a bit better, so they'll suck up the fresh tanning solution more easily.
So, one of the important lessons I've learnt from my research into natural vegetable tanning is to make sure you don't just forget about it. You want to agitate often, refresh the liquor often, and definitely not just leave it for eight months while you do other things.
Having said that, as baby's first #tanning project, where I kinda forgot about it half way through and left everything for eight months, the results are not as terrible as I thought.
One square didn't tan properly (on the left) and started to decay. The rest… well, they're not even, but they feel much tougher than they were before, they don't smell bad, and I couldn't find any sign of decay, so I'm going to call this a qualified success.
In case you're wondering, I'm tanning rawhide dog treats, and using a mix of ornamental pear and wattle bark for my tannins.
Everything is dry, and I'm glad to say I've made my first batch of leather from dog treats and reclaimed garden waste.
I still need to oil it and work it some more, but I'm genuinely impressed how well they turned out. It's certainly not the highest quality leather by any measure, but it is *tough* and incredibly strong. If one were so inclined I imagine one could fabricate a suit of lamellar armour from these.
I oiled one of my leather patches with duck fat, because it's what I had on hand.
I have no idea if that was the right choice, but it smells delicious now.
Paul Fenwick
Betsy