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At the home of the Dyer 🌷🌾🌿. After a seri

At the home of the Dyer 🌷🌾🌿. After a series of hide camps the past few weeks, I got the chance to visit @tinyislandtextiles, in all her Indigo denizenry.

Thanks for the hospitality + for being the sweetest, denimed-up tour guide around, with a depth of local knowledge to share after such a short time in your new home ☺️.

📸:

1. Smuggler Cove, Shishalh Nation territory.

The port that connected Chinese Canadians to the USA in the 1880s, after they were denied further employment upon the CN railroad’s completion. A rare instance that an official English place name reflects a piece of history crucial to know about a place.

2 + 3. Scraping Black Walnut (Juglans nigra) bark with a hatchet + boiling the bark flakes to extract tannins.

I’ve never seen success with the famed walnut husks for hide tanning - but they do make an incredible black dye that turns rawhide into a pitch-black textile, or turns buckskin into a deep chestnut brown. The bark though? Maybe!

4. Nicola’s research Indigo dye batches, harvested from the garden and transformed with alkali mixtures.

I’m continuously enamoured with the overlap between hide tanning and natural dyeing. The same plants, the same substrates, the same feel to the day - and often in very complementary ways: one part of a plant may be a dye, another a tanning agent.

5. Our makeshift hide camp, finishing some buckskins from a class with elementary school kiddos the week prior that was a little too rainy and a little too party to bring the hides to completion earlier.

This cute-as-a-button sheepskin is part of a fundr

This cute-as-a-button sheepskin is part of a fundraiser for Lindsy Belcourt @kisikaw_acahkos_iskwew ‘s tuition (see more info in the link).

This is a “hair sheep,” so no wool: fine, soft hair on a 2x3ft sheepskin. A lovely little rug or pet bed (I had to shoo Coyah away for this pic; she endorses).

This is how it works:

Click the link in bio and choose your price. Tickets are:

$5 - 1 ticket
$10 - 3 tickets
$15 - 4 tickets!

*ships anywhere* at no cost.

For those who were in @knitsocial’s class today, you get 2 extra tickets when you sign up for the raffle!

This Sunday, I’ll be teaching Natural Sheepskin

This Sunday, I’ll be teaching Natural Sheepskin Tanning online at #knitcity, hosted by @knitsocial + @knitcitycanada.

Knit City is an annual celebration of fibre arts in Vancouver, on Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territories.

It is amazing to see what these organizers pull together. Teachers from around the continent share their place-based knowledge of animal tending + fibre crafting.

Natural Sheepskin Tanning will cover the 3 natural tanning methods: mineral, smoke, + bark tanning; plus histories of hide tanning and cultural contexts.

Sunday, October 4 at 12:00pm PDT. Link in bio.

🐏🐑🐏

Check out my stories for other amazing workshops this weekend!

📸 by @andrearangelknits
📷 of @jennypijackson

#fibreart #knitting #knitsocial #beautifulbc #sheepskin #sheepskinrug #sheepskintanning #knitcityvirtual

Alum-tawed sheepskins, hanging after tanning + gro

Alum-tawed sheepskins, hanging after tanning + grooming. This mineral tanning method is built geographically wherever alum is found in great quantity, mainly Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.

Sometimes alum has a high presence in the soil, and people bury hides wrapped in dirt to reveal a tanned hide pulled from the earth (Eastern Europe). Sometimes alum is found in deposits, forming crystal-like shimmering crusts, and people break off pieces to massage into a hide (Scotland).

I use the soak method for my mineral tanning. I mix alum with salt in a container of water and let the hide absorb the ingredients. I stir, churn, and observe over a week or two until the hide is bright white and has this particular alum-y feel to it.

I call this work ‘artisanal’ rather than ‘traditional.’ Though I am using the same ingredients as my ancestors, the details have evolved with technology as well as with loss of culture.

Tradition is more than the ingredients that go into a tanning method; it is a manifestation of ritual and community crafting. Tradition is the “who,” not the “what.”

I aim to honour my own (well) ancestors and, as a settler on this continent, to make space for those currently who tan hides in their respective traditions, by calling myself an artisan, not a traditionalist.
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📸 by @andrearangelknits
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.
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#artisan #hidetanning #beautifulbc #womenoutdoors #hiking #sheepskin #sheepskins #sheepskintanning #bushcraft #survival #healing #ancestralskills

I started a summer COVID-safe hide tanning road tr

I started a summer COVID-safe hide tanning road trip a bit ago, the first of its kind for Crowsnest. Last week in the middle of it, my truck with my mobile tannery in it was stolen.

It’s been over a week, and I am still in shock! I hoped that it would turn up quick with my tools, hides, everything inside. Sadly instead I need to turn my energy to rebuilding.

Some dear friends have started a fundraiser on my behalf. I’ll be sharing this for the next little while - and also posting photos of the amazing hide tanning times we had prior to this! - and if you feel so called, please support + share it. 🙌🏽

Thanks so much to my sweet friends who have helped along the way. I have borrowed tools, materials, and a vehicle to continue part of my trip and to get home safely. So grateful for community.

Fundraiser link in bio 🦌

I was honoured to be interviewed on The Numinous P

I was honoured to be interviewed on The Numinous Podcast this week by the incredible @carmenspagnola. We got very personal about family, our skills journeys, and kinship with the more-than-human world.
...
We also talk about a necessary part of ancestral skills in a settler-colonial context: redress.
...
Redress is the compensation made for a grievance. For a while, the word ‘reconciliation’ was used to sidestep the crux of this. ‘Reconciliation’ implies that two parties should meet halfway; to reconcile their differences as if each has done the other wrong.
...
Redress, on the other hand, makes no excuses. It is literal. It is action. Reparations are a form of redress, as are the personal compensatory acts we can each do in our daily lives. If we are settlers on Indigenous lands - whether we are mixed or not, whether our ancestors also suffered or not - we inherited a legacy that is ours to claim and do justice to.
...
I want to take this moment to give voice to a commitment I made moments prior to Covid. The public hide tanning + ancestral skills workshops that I offer are free for Indigenous people.
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Workshops from here on out are available on a sliding scale, starting at $0 for Indigenous people who so choose, and scaling up for settlers to step in and co-create redress.
...
I thought I was already offering this, but with feedback I realized I had not made my intentions clear nor communicated the reality of the offering, which I had previously (ahem, erroneously) framed as a “bursary.” I offer this to anyone who chooses it, not as a commentary on personal finances but as a way to centre redress - and ultimately, healing - at the core of ancestral skills.
...
I am still gauging how to take this model to private workshops and 1:1 consultations, but with this interview I want to share my process now, one that is forming + formulating.
...
Thank you @vidyacrawley for helping guide this; @femme.magic + @kialaluu for the community care; and @burnt.sundreamz + @shauna.mikomi for how much I learn with + from you!

Link to Carmen’s and my convo in bio. 🦌🐏🐃

Bio•philia, the impulse to love living systems.

Bio•philia, the impulse to love living systems.

In conversation with my friend @carmenspagnola today, we talked about the compulsion we each felt the first time we tanned hides.

When I first tanned a hide, and when I first learned the names and qualities of plants, it was like a switch turned on. I went from not knowing something was missing in my life, to knowing exactly what I had been pining for.

This Pipsissewa flower - Chimaphila umbellata - is so rare to see, a tiny bloom in a sea of evergreen leaves. It was one of the first medicines I used to support my body through a chronic health crisis and emerge in wellness. I am forever grateful to it, not only for helping me heal but for teaching me confidence in my relationship to wild plants. To trust that innate sense of wonder and yearning.

Now whenever I see its evergreen leaves I remember an important journey, and these rare moments of flowering totally stop me in my tracks.

A spread for hide tanning. Fish skin tanning. Th

A spread for hide tanning. Fish skin tanning.

The middle is the final product, fishskin leather tanned with just Red Rose tea.

To the left: the shimmery skin that’s about to be sliced from the fillet and scraped of scales and fat. To the right: the fillet that moments later went on the fire.

Above: mezzalunas, the Italian housewife knife (similar to ulus, but legit not as versatile as them tbh) and handhold scrapers, a Scandinavian style tool handmade in Sweden.

In one week the fresh salmon skins will be leather!

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