

I’m trying to decide what I’m going to do with it. That’s okay though, now that it’s tanned, I can store it and finish it the next time I have the fireplace going. Otherwise, it will get hard again every time it gets wet. If it started to dry, I just got it a little wet again and kept going.Īt this point, you need to smoke it for 15 – 30 minutes to waterproof it. I rolled over the hide for 5-10 minutes every hour until I got it nice and soft. This looks like I’m rolling out the weirdest cookies ever. Then I got out my trusty tanning helper (aka the rolling pin). You can use the smaller pieces as cat toys. Make small cuts or you will end up chopping the whole thing to pieces. See how clean it is now? It’s still really wet though. It took me about 3 washes to get it really clean. The next morning, I washed off the hide really well to remove all of the dirt from the fur as well as the egg yolks from the hide.

Make sure you don’t use hot water, you don’t want to scramble your eggs.

The purpose of the wet towel is to keep the egg yolk mixture moist. Then you cover it with a wet towel and let it sit overnight. I smeared the egg yolks on the hide, trying to avoid the fur as much as possible. You could also use an animal brain instead of egg yolks, but… yuck. I also prepared a tanning mixture, using 4 egg yolks.
#Tanning rabbit hides easy skin
Every now and then I had to use a knife, but I mostly just peeled pieces off, little by little.Īfter I got as much meat, fat, and skin off of the hide as I could, I took it inside and laid it out. It was sort of like peeling off a layer of old glue. The next day, I started peeling off the dried skin, meat, and fat from the hide.
#Tanning rabbit hides easy how to
If you hunt rabbits and want to learn how to tan a rabbit’s hide, then this is the article you need to read. So, DH (dear hubby) skinned her and I did my best to tan the hide and make it useable for us in the future.įirst, I obtained the hide, laid it fur side down outside, and covered it in salt. Tanning a rabbit hide is easy and fairly quick process. It might sound a little morbid, but she died of natural causes, she is livestock, and it’s silly to waste her fur because I’m feeling a little squeamish. We decided that before we disposed of her body, we would skin her. We were all sad that she died, she was a great rabbit. Last Monday, one of our rabbits Bandit-doe, was acting lethargic and not eating.
