Lakeland PBS presents Common Ground.

Brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Production funding of Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji.

Continuing their second century of service to the community.

Member FDIC.

Welcome to Common Ground.

I'm producer director Scott Knudson.

In this episode we conclude with part three of Nate Johnson Hide Tanning.

So this is the hide that we saw from the other day and I sewed it together with another hide that I had softened previously.

So, I made a sack out of them together.

So, there's two hides.

So, the smoke is going to get put up in between these two hides.

You can do one at a time but it's just more efficient to do two.

So, I'm just getting ready to hang it from a pole here so.

So, I just need to get some sticks in here to prop the hides open.

Right now they're touching each other.

I need to have space in there for the smoke to get in there.

I got some different lengths here.

We'll see what which one works.

So, I just want to get it so that along all the edges and down the middle, the two hides aren't touching.

So, sticks inside kind of help prop it apart.

Pretty important to get it just right and get my punky wood and then we'll get going with this.

So, I just got some coals from the wood stove and I'm going to add some punky.

I think this is Spruce here but most any punky wood will work.

I learned to use Spruce and Pine but I know a lot of people use boy all kinds of different stuff.

Birch or a lot of my friends in this area talk about Willow being an old preferred punky wood but it all seems to work pretty well.

That's it.

We'll be at this for probably an hour and a half.

I always think it doesn't take that long but then it always takes that long.

So, yeah we can see we're getting smoke up through here now and the main thing is just to keep an eye on that the non-fire, the punky wood and then keeping the air out of it will keep it from burning.

So, we just want smoke and no flame.

So, we'll continuously as those chunks of punky wood smolder down, we need to keep adding fresh stuff on top.

So, I'll just be constantly doing that and rule number one is never walk away, because if you walk away then you're no longer tending your your smoke and it can catch flame if you don't keep tending it and then your hides will burn.

I've seen it happen.

I've just got some little bits of wool here.

I'm just plugging any big holes in the hide but there really aren't any.

There's just a couple on the edge so.

So, I'll just every couple minutes, I adjust my prop sticks here.

It just keeps, otherwise, you get a little point that the smoke doesn't hit the hide.

You get a little white spot.

So, right now we have unsmoked fat softened brains in this case, hides.

They're soft.

If they get wet right now they'll get stiff again and after smoking, something happens in there.

Where after being smoked you can get your hides wet and they will still remain soft.

Make sure there's no hot coals exposed.

Use my hand and I just feel around for hot spots and I want to cover up anything that's hot.

I try to keep a good mix of of wood ready.

If you do get a flare up, you use some really fine, really fine punk and that'll smother, smother any hot spots.

Otherwise, I just try to keep adding stuff about that size.

It's a great smell.

It's a classic campfire smell.

You know, unfortunately, because I do do a lot of things that seem to involve smoke, I've had, I almost had a woman call the fire department on me while I was in the library.

She came in and she thought the library was burning and I said, I said no it's me.

I'm just used to it.

You know, because my hands will smell like, in my clothes, it'll smell like smoke for days.

But it's happened multiple times.

Yeah, so I'm just listening because you can hear when something's about to ignite.

Very subtly, there'll be a little bit of a crackle and a there's a little wind today which which is tricky.

Normally, I don't smoke when there's any wind.

Now the thin edges of the hide are all ready.

You can start to see the color of the smoke showing through on the thin edges.

It's starting to take on a hue.

Functionally, it smoked fairly soon but often I'll smoke it extra just because I like going for a rich brown hue.

You know, a good color.

Oh, this is going really well.

So, I can use a hole in the hide to check the color.

We've got kind of a light tan right now.

So, yeah, another 15 minutes on this side.

A lot of my journey in learning how to do things for myself, how to live where I live and to depend on the resources where I live to meet my needs.

So, that's, this is part of one of my big goals and what I'm trying to understand is how do we live, where we're at.

Like how do we use what's around us to to meet these needs of our life that we all have and that which people have always done.

You know, it's pretty recent this whole, I mean people have always traded and goods have moved around the world but we are unusually historically disconnected from the basic needs of our life.

I mean almost totally disconnected, We don't have a relationship, direct relationship with most of our food or things we wear or the things that built our house and and so a lot of in my explorations and trying to figure out how to do this myself, I have have been drawn to Indigenous practices, because you know in this area the Anishinabe or Dakota were the masters of living a life in their place and having that intimate relationship with all the sources of their life and all their all their needs.

So, I've learned a lot from from them because yeah they understood what that means to live in that place year after year, depending on the different life around them.

Part of the way I work with using Indigenous practices when that's not my own heritage is the acknowledgement of it.

You know, I think that that in itself is a beginning and the one reason that we acknowledge it is because a lot of these Indigenous practices are no longer widely practiced because and it wasn't a voluntary decision necessarily for Indigenous people but it was taken from them through residential schools and the intentional destruction of their culture.

And, so yeah, I mean it's important.

For me it's been important to just acknowledge where that comes from, where these practices come from and I haven't always worked with with indigenous communities but I have done a lot more lately and specifically as someone when I started teaching these skills more widely, I've worked really hard to make sure that I also have a relationship with the community who developed these skills.

So, yeah building birchbark canoes and tanning hides, I mean they're all simple technological practices that allow people to use the things around them as part of their daily life but they also, you know, it gets complicated because of the whole cultural element.

So, I think acknowledging that history is important.

I don't know, I just have so much respect for the people and cultures that created these technologies which represent a life way and you know, hopefully, that comes through in the way I do things and how I use them.

So, I think that's important to my attempt at personal expression as a way to honor the history.

Well, things are looking pretty, pretty smoke.

This thicker hide is not as dark but let's see if I can use this hole to look way back in there.

Oh, yeah, that looks good.

So, I'm just gonna flip it inside out.

Don't let it touch the ground.

Oh, it's like unwrapping a present.

Ooh, that's nice.

Boy, that came out really good.

Nice and even color but now we'll smoke the inside.

This is the outside of the hide.

I smoked that first and so now turn it inside out.

We'll smoke the inside of the hide which is the part that you don't see but it's good to also, you know, make that not water resistant but able to stay soft even if it's wet.

So, you gotta smoke the inside too.

Not as long because I'm not as worried about the aesthetics of it.

Got to rip the seams.

I just do this on an industrial sewing machine but you can hand sew it or you can use glue.

You can staple them together.

It takes a lot of staples.

I find sewing is the best but know some people that just use a hundred clothespins.

I'm just, I don't really like that method but it works for some people.

Yeah, you can see some white along the edge there where it got sewn together and the smoke didn't really penetrate it very well, so that usually gets trimmed off since it's not smoked.

You would tend to get to stiffen up if it got wet and it just doesn't look the same but I usually save it and use it for quickie cordage or whatever.

So, it has some use just won't be in the finished, a finished piece of clothing.

I'm just going to hang these up to air them out for a few days.

Smoke smell is pretty intense right now.

Well, I've got this beaver hide out of the creek where I was soaking it and we did the check and it's been struck through, so the tannins have gone all the way through to the center of the skin.

Letting it sit in running water for a day gets rid of all the unfixed tannins.

So, the hide's got a lot of solution in there that has nowhere to bind to and it's just sitting in there.

So, we want to rinse all those unfixed tannins out before we get ready to soften.

So, I pulled it out.

It's been sitting for about 24 hours and on this beam here, I'm gonna, they call it scutting, moving solution through the hide with a with a flushing tool and it's something I do occasionally while it's tanning just to keep the solution moving through.

But now I'm just trying to get it all out so the hide starts drying and then I can get ready to soften.

But, I need to get a towel on this beam so I don't do any damage to the the grain layer.

So, I'm just going to grab a towel for cushion to take some pressure off the off the skin, specifically off the grain layer so that doesn't get scratched while doing this.

So, yeah, just gently, the same thing you'd be doing if you were scraping a hide except I'm just trying to be gentle and push the the water out.

And, I'm just working on the flesh side, the inside of the hide because again we want to protect, we want to protect the grain layer from damage.

Yeah, so now we're going to set this out in the shade to slowly dry and as it starts to dry, we'll pull on it and soften it and I'll be rubbing some fat into it.

Any sort of fat or oil will work but I've got some old deer tallow that I rendered.

So, I think that's what I'm going to use on this one.

So, I've got some deer tallow.

Deer fat cubed up and slowly cooked in a pot at a low temperature to get all the water out and once all the water is out it's pretty stable.

So, this is probably a year old and it's not sealed but I wouldn't eat it any anymore but it's good for utility.

It won't mold because all the water is out of it.

I'm going to take the tallow and rub it into both sides and, you know, you can use olive oil.

You can use, you could probably use Crisco.

Just gonna rub it in.

A stiffer fat like deer tallow is a little bit harder fat, at room temperature a little more solid.

So, it'll give a slightly firmer leather but it shouldn't make too much difference for what i'm doing and the hide is about half dry.

It started to dry.

You don't want to do it while it's still totally wet but you want to get it all rubbed in and I think this does a couple things here.

One is with soaking in the tannin bath for oh this has been almost two months, it, I think a lot of the natural greases all get extracted from the hide, especially having been soaked in the wood ash solution and then the tannin.

So, we want to put some fats back in the hide particularly because we've left the grain layer on this leather and we want to condition that, condition the grain and keep it from getting brittle.

And, it also it does help soften the hide.

It'll be different than how I did the deer hide which was on a frame and pretty extreme stretching.

So, this is going to be less of that but the same idea.

We're still going to keep it moving as it dries so that it's a little bit softer.

I do want some softness to it and so I almost can do the same thing on the inside of the hide.

And, I'll probably do this one more time as it dries but this is the basic idea of finishing a bark tan here.

Getting fat and oils back into the skin and a little bit of stretching as it dries.

The more stretching, the softer you can get.

So, I'll just let that sit for a while and then do a little stretching and softening and add a little more fat as needed.

That's on its way to being done.

Well, we've done all the hide work, the tanning and now for the really difficult part, the sewing.

No sewing machine, all by hand and so finding an old pair of pants that fits you well and taking them apart, a trick I learned is really the way to go.

I've got my old pants torn apart into four pieces.

So, I got them laid out here on the hide.

I've already cut them out and started but just show you how I do the layout.

And it's important to understand how the hide works as far as thickness and stretch.

The center of the hide.

So, here's our neck and the spine.

So, down the center of the spine and then the rump right here.

That's your thickest part of your hide therefore also the least stretchy.

So, I try to avoid getting kind of the thinner belly and leg skin when I'm doing something that needs, it's more sturdy like pants.

Laid out right down the center four hides.

It creates a lot of scrap but it's not waste because it's all super useful for the many other things to be made and I can show you some sewing.

So, I usually, like I said, I cut the lacing out of out of, this is kind of the thinner belly skin.

Because I mostly try to do finer stitching and if you if you take the thicker hide and use that for lacing you get a really chunky chunky lacing.

It just doesn't look as good.

This lays flat and allows you to do more decorative stitching.

So, I just, it's pretty straightforward, just and if, you know, I use up all my scrap cutting lacing.

It takes an incredible amount of lacing especially on something like a pair of pants where I'm stitching all the seams with with buckskin lacing and doing lots of double stitched seams.

So, I don't tend to have much scrap around after I'm done with the project and if there's a faster way to do this, I don't know what it is.

I'm not just cutting mindlessly.

Where the hide is thicker, I cut narrower or where the hide is thinner, I cut wider because I'm going to stretch it all out.

And when it's stretched out I want it to look the same.

The thin stuff will stretch more.

I just got to clean up so I can make the corner here.

This is where you can take a small piece of leather and by doing this, by cutting in a spiral, you can make a lot of lacing.

So, here's the cut thong and then the last step is just get it wet and then stretch it out, you know, it was pretty wide and now it's pulling pretty thin.

So, this is important just to, after you stitch something together if you just use regular unstretched thong, of course, it'll loosen up as you use it.

So, by getting it wet helps it stretch out and the stretch to stay in the in the lacing.

So, this will keep my seams tighter.

Should we do a little stitching?

So, this is the pants all cut out.

I've cut my back pockets out and don't have them on yet.

I'll do those last and I've got one front pocket cut in here, with, that's the beaver bark tan, beaver leather and they'll be the back pockets will also be the beaver leather.

So, I've got to just kind of loosely stitch together a thread and I'll pull this thread out as I go.

The side seams will be what's called a saddle stitch or harness stitch.

It's a using two threads and weaving in and out to create a really tight lock stitch, so it's got totally filled on the front and back.

So, I have just a piece of Basswood here.

Sometimes I use Cedar, just a soft wood that I can push my awl into.

I just eyeball stitch length and sink it into the board.

The board's preventing it from going through into the butt basically.

So, I usually just poke a few holes and then I use these brass lacing needles.

You just cut your lacing fine and you can kind of screw it in.

There's actually threads inside the back of the needle.

It helps.

You don't need it.

I learned how to sew buckskin without these but from the outside from the inside.

So, as you can imagine, this whole leg both, inner seams, there's gonna be a whole belt thing on there, both pockets, the fly, stitching the cuffs.

I'm in for some sewing here.

My guess is I'll probably have 40 hours of sewing ahead of me maybe a little more and which is funny because I do own and regularly use an industrial sewing machine which works very well and it's all set up and ready to go and I could probably sew these pants, it would still take some time but you know eight hours, six to four hours.

I don't know.

It wouldn't take long now that it's all cut out.

And, I'm not trying to be to be a heavy or be depressed about making my pair of pants because I'm doing this because I think it's fun and I love being engaged in the process.

Well, we are down to our final button.

This is a button from a young a young buck I shot oh probably five years ago.

Yeah, I tried to find a suitable antler piece from an animal that I had shot just to keep the theme going here of the all homemade clothing and I found an antler to make a really nice durable button.

Left over right, then right over left.

You want to make a square knot, not a granny knot.

Make sure it's not too tight.

There we are.

Got our beaver leather pockets.

So, to go with my pants, I made a new winter parka pullover.

It's also got beaver leather trim on it, on the sleeves and on the pocket, the hood, drawstring hood.

So, this is five hides, it took me to sew that and I made a new pair of of a winter mukluks just from one more deer hide.

Yeah, so if my pants are four deer hides and my parka is five, my mukluks are one, that's ten and if I wear my coat underneath, that's another deer hide.

That's 14 hides.

If each of those takes 12 hours to tan and then all the sewing and then the hunting and the skinning, my guess is I have 500 hours of work involved in that outfit.

Yeah, the economics of this don't add up.

So, you got to believe in what you're doing right?

That's the alternative to spending a little money.

So the last pair of pants I made lasted me eight years.

I hope to get another eight out of these maybe more and these represent this little dream I've had for a long time of making my own clothing from scratch and it has taken me years to figure out how to do it and yeah so this is just a little it's something I can wear and it's also a manifestation of something I believe in.

But, at least for me, this represents something that I have been thinking about for for 20 years now, when I first started thinking about my clothing and I'm still trying to to work it out.

Thanks so much for watching.

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Production funding of Common Ground was made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji.

Continuing their second century of service to the community.

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