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Dressing a dog skin at home. Degreasing and washing hair and mezdra

How to dress the skin of a sheep at home so that it does not lose its presentation? After all, sheep are bred mainly for wool and meat, but some farmers throw away the skins. And the point here is not at all that the skin itself is of no value, just few people know how to dress it correctly. Most beginners give up this activity after the first unsuccessful attempt. In fact, dressing sheep skins at home is a difficult task, but quite doable. It is only necessary to strictly observe the technology of the process.

Peculiarities of dressing skins

The whole process of dressing consists of several stages: aging, skinning, picking, washing, tanning and drying. It is worth noting the fact that it is necessary to start processing the skin as soon as possible, without putting things off indefinitely. Otherwise, the skin will lose its presentation and, accordingly, its value.

In order for the whole procedure of dressing skins to be understandable not only to specialists, but also to beginners in this matter, we will consider in detail each stage of the work. So let's get started.

After you have skinned a slaughtered sheep, you must carefully examine it. If pieces of fat, meat or tendons remain on the inside, it is recommended to scrape them off with a knife.

All excess debris is removed from the wool, the sheepskin must be clean. After inspection, the skin can be folded in half and put in a cool place for two hours.

Dressing stages

In order to qualitatively dress the skin of a ram, it is better to start work immediately after removing it. This is what the process of dressing at home should look like.

Soak

For this procedure, you will need a spacious container. The fact is that sheep are rather large animals, and the skin must be completely hidden by saline solution. To prepare such a solution, you will need:

  • furatsilin or formalin;
  • salt;
  • acetic acid.

A solution is made according to the following recipe: for each liter of water, two tablets of furacilin or 0.1 milliliter of formalin are dissolved. The salt content in such a solution can vary from 30 to 50 grams at the discretion of the farmer.

As an antiseptic, you can add acetic acid to the solution, at the rate of 5 grams per liter of water.

Experienced furriers add decoctions of oak, birch or willow leaves. The proportion of such decoctions in the solution should not exceed 500 grams per 10 liters of water.

In such a saline solution, the skins must be soaked for at least twelve hours. If after this period, the skin does not soften, then it is necessary to repeat the whole procedure again.

To understand that the skin is ready for further processing, you need to scrape the inside (mezdra) with your fingernail. If it will give in easily, you can proceed to the next step.

Mezdrenie

The purpose of this process is to rid the skin of possible residues of fat and fat. In addition, it helps to remove the extra layer of skin.

This is done as follows: the skin is stretched on a flat surface or a special machine. The work is done with an iron scraper or a blunt knife. This is done so as not to accidentally damage the skin. Skinning is usually carried out from the back, gradually moving towards the head.

Wash

After you have finished skinning, the treated skin must be washed. To do this, it must be immersed in a cleaning solution for five minutes. To prepare it you will need:

  • washing powder - 3 grams;
  • table salt - 20 grams.

All dosages are based on one liter of water.

After the fleece has been in the cleaning solution, it is squeezed out and proceed to the next step.

Pickling

This stage is aimed at improving the properties of the rune. After pickling, the fibers soften and the lamb skin becomes more elastic.

The pickling solution is made from water, salt and acid. Moreover, the acid can be used both acetic and formic. To prepare a solution, for every liter of water add 50 grams of salt, 15 grams of acetic acid or 5 formic acid.

As in the case of soaking, the fleece should remain in the solution for about 12 hours. You can check how successful the process is as follows: the fleece is bent in half and squeezed. After straightening, a clearly visible strip should remain at the fold.

Tanning

It is impossible to qualitatively dress the skin of a sheep without tanning at home. The purpose of this stage is to give your products strength. This procedure is again associated with the preparation of the solution. For this you will need:

  • table salt - 50 grams;
  • chrome tanning agent - 6 grams.

All components are indicated for one liter of water. The skins are lowered into the prepared hot solution and left for a day. It is necessary to monitor the process, not allowing the solution to cool, and periodically heating it up.

Fattening

This stage is aimed at giving your products shine. To prepare the composition you will need:

  • table salt - 100 grams;
  • glycerin - 25 grams;
  • ammonia - 20 grams;
  • egg yolk - 70 grams.

The solution is applied to the core. After that, the skins are stacked in such a way that their inner parts are in close contact.

Drying

To begin with, you need to squeeze the fleece, this can be done using a centrifuge. After that, the skins are dried in thermal chambers at a temperature of 40 degrees.

As you can see, there is nothing complicated in dressing. Most of the time, you will be making various saline solutions. Show a little attention and responsibility, and everything will work out for you.

The quality of the fur also depends on how well the rabbit skins are dressed. It is far from always possible for rabbit breeders to find such specialists who perfectly dress rabbit skins, so the question arises: how to dress a rabbit skin on your own?

Primary processing of the removed skin and storage

At home, this operation will require certain chemicals, a sharp knife and salt. Of course, from the first time, rarely does anyone manage to perfectly dress the skin: the fur will climb in shreds or the skin will not be tanned. Do not despair - by following exactly the recommendations in this article, you will eventually learn how to easily cope with the dressing of rabbit skins.

It is much more difficult to remove fat with muscles from a dry rabbit skin.

After removing the skin after, you must immediately remove the fat and muscle remaining on it. It is most convenient to scrape off muscles and fat with a knife, pulling the still warm skin over a previously prepared wooden blank. When scraping, the blade of the knife should be at a right angle to the skin, scraping should be from the tail to the head. You can remove muscle and fat with your hands, collecting the layer in a circle. Keep in mind that it is much more difficult to remove fat with muscles from a dry rabbit skin.

Video about dressing rabbit skins

If you're not going to do dressing right away, preserve the hide. Pull it with the fur inside to dry on a special rule made in the form of the letter A from a wooden board. The horizontal bar must be movable so that you can narrow or expand the rule to the required size. It is recommended to fasten the lower end of the rabbit skin, otherwise it will gather in folds, and the fur in the folds will prop up and come out. Do not leave rabbit skins unspread even for a day - they will quickly rot. They should also not be stored in the cold.

Place the rule with a stretched skin in a ventilated room, the temperature in which is not higher than +30. In a damp room, the skin will become moldy, and in the sun or near the stove it will become brittle. Try not to store rabbit skins for a long time so that moths do not spoil them. If you need to accumulate more skins for sewing a fur product, put them in a clean, tight-fitting box in a cool room, additionally putting bags of moth remedies there.

Try not to store rabbit skins for a long time so that moths do not spoil them.

Step-by-step instructions on how to make a rabbit skin

The process of dressing rabbit skins includes several specific steps that must be performed in strict sequence.

Soak off

Mix the soaking solution from 1 liter of water, 30 g of borax, 2 g of carbolic acid (in crystalline form), 50 g of salt. You can use other antiseptics: sodium bisulfite (2 g), furatsilin (1-2 tablets). If the skins were already well salted during conservation, less salt is added to the solution.

The solution is poured into a sufficiently capacious container made of stainless steel, glass or enameled container. After laying the skins in the solution, place a heavy object on them so that they do not float up and are covered with water by at least two centimeters. During the soaking process, stir the skins from time to time for a more uniform treatment with the solution.

During the soaking process, stir the skins from time to time for a more uniform treatment with the solution.

The soaking process can last from six hours to four days. Skins that have been canned recently soak faster, and those that have been poorly degreased or dried too quickly soak worse and longer. You can determine the degree of readiness of the skin by the following signs:

  • the hair is firmly held in the skin, without stretching,
  • the mezra has softened, it is well wrinkled in any place.

Mezdrenie

After carefully removing the remaining water from the soaked skins, and wiping them dry, you can start removing the inner layers (skinning) and loosening the fibrous tissue of the skin so that the subsequent treatment with chemicals is more effective.

First of all, with a sharp knife, the remnants of muscle and fat are removed from inner surface skin, then the skin is cut to the same thickness over the entire area of ​​​​the skin. After that, with the blunt part of the knife, the mezra is broken down from the tail to the head, as well as from the tail to the floors. Do the work carefully, conscientiously, but do not get carried away too much, otherwise you risk exposing the hair roots on the skin.

After carefully removing the remaining water from the soaked skins, and wiping them dry, you can start removing the inner layers

After skinning, rabbit skins need to be washed and degreased. Prepare a degreasing solution from one liter of water and 4 g of washing powder. Having stretched the skins by hand, you will notice how the mezra turned white and began to creak on your fingers, like freshly washed hair. Now transfer the rabbit skins to clean water, rinse and transfer to a container of soapy water (about 10 g of soap per liter of warm water). Lather the wool to a clean squeak and rinse again. After washing, hang the skins, beat with a stick to shake off the water and walk with a dry cloth.

Pickling

To make the skins strong, they should be treated with a solution containing acid: add 30 g of salt and 15 ml of acetic acid per liter of water. Immerse the rabbit skins in the solution, flesh side out, and stir frequently. Pickling can last from several hours to a couple of days, but it is better to underexpose the skins in the solution than overdo it.

You can determine the readiness of the rabbit skin by testing for “drying”, removing the skin from the solution, bending the mezra and squeezing the fold - when opening, a “drying” (white stripe) should appear. If it does not disappear within five seconds, then the skin is ripe. In the finished rabbit skin, the hairs in the groin area can be easily plucked, and the inner layer is separated by fingers.

bed sore

It is advisable, after lying for 20 minutes, to place the rabbit skins in a solution of baking soda

After pickling, the rabbit skins need to be squeezed out a little, turned outward with fur and put in a pile, and some kind of load should be placed on top. Bedding lasts from 12 hours to a day. It is advisable, after lying for 20 minutes, to place the rabbit skins in a solution of baking soda, since acid still remains on them.

Tanning

Thanks to tanning, the skin of the rabbit will shrink less, the skin will become more durable and resistant to water, and the fur will gain additional elasticity. For tanning, you should not use oak broth - from it the skins of rabbits coarsen. Bark from willow trees or willows is best suited.

Boil the bark for 30 minutes in a saucepan, pour the solution separately, add 40 g of salt per liter of water to it, and cool. Please note that willow decoction not only dyes the rabbit's skin creamy, but also the fur, so you can not soak the whole skins, but just apply the decoction with a brush on the mezra. To impregnate the skins with a tanning agent, fold the skins inside and leave for another day to lie down, and then dry them, periodically removing them from the rule and stretching them into different directions. When the skins are semi-dry and velvety to the touch, the skin will need to be sanded to achieve optimum softness.

Video about dressing rabbit skins at home

Zhirovka

After tanning, fatliquoring of the skins is carried out to give them greater plasticity, strength and water resistance. Zhirovka is done with a mixture of prepared egg yolk with glycerin in equal proportions.

The fat mixture or solution is applied to the skin and the skins are left to age for several hours. After that, the rabbit skins are dried again, kneaded, the mezra is rubbed with chalk so that it absorbs excess fat, the fur is combed. This completes the dressing of rabbit skins - it is recommended to store the finished skins in cotton or linen fabric bags, but not in plastic bags!

Since ancient times, man has been breeding animals in order to obtain meat, milk and skins. Dressing skins at home takes a significant amount of time and requires certain skills. With the right approach, the result is worth the effort. To obtain a competitive skin suitable for sewing fur products, it is necessary to correctly follow all the stages of dressing.

Preparing skins for dressing

When dressing skins, attention must be paid to the time of slaughter. The best period starts from late autumn and ends in early spring. Before this period, most animals undergo molting, which affects the quality of the skin. Molting can be over the entire cover of the skin or located in separate areas. With proper nutrition In a healthy individual, molting is carried out quickly; in weakened animals, this process may be completely absent or delayed for a long period.

The removed skin is sprinkled with table salt to eliminate excess moisture, it is cleaned of the remnants of fat, muscle tissue and meat. This work is carried out on a blank - an oval-shaped board. The skin should be fur inside. For its degreasing use a sharp knife with a raised end. As a result of this preparatory work the fleece becomes hard and dry.

Disassembly

Sorting is needed to identify defects that do not meet the quality standard. Some of them can be eliminated during a number of events, others will have to be taken into account when creating constructive patterns for sewing a fur product.

Determination of the weight of the skin

Weighing is necessary for the preparation of the emulsion in the process of passing through the stages of dressing. For an accurate result, the skin is weighed at least three times and the average value is displayed. The fleece must be clean without various kinds of weighting agents - cuts, dirt residues and blood clots.

Sorting

Sorting is carried out according to the size and thickness of the skin layer. There are three varieties:

  • The first includes skins of winter slaughter with a thick pile and white leather fabric.
  • To the second - autumn slaughter skins with fluffy, but underdeveloped hair.
  • To the third grade - skins with low guard hair and blue mezra. The size of the skins is measured in square centimeters.

After the preparatory stage, they begin dressing the skins.

The process of dressing skins at home is laborious and costly. Subject to all conditions work and stages of dressing will please ready sample, from which in the future you will get a beautiful and high-quality fur product.

How to make skins?

If you do not take care of the trophy from the hunt in time, you will soon have to throw it away. That is why it is so important to know how to properly dress animal skins. This process includes quite a few steps, but you will be able to save your trophy, and it's worth the time spent. Moreover, you can make good money on dressing skins, since not every hunter undertakes this work.

How to make animal skins?

Before dressing the skin of an animal, it is necessary to remove it correctly, degrease and dry it. Thus, it will be possible to get really high-quality fur.

For home dressing you will need the following:

  • vinegar essence;
  • washing powder;
  • hyposulfite;
  • salt;
  • ammonia;
  • wooden standard rules;
  • roots or bark of tannins;
  • fish fat;
  • tassel.

Skin soaking and skinning

Immerse dry skins in a salt solution (40 g per 1 liter of water). Its temperature should be room temperature. For 1 kg of skins, 10 liters of solution will be required. They should lie in it for up to 24 hours. Then turn the soaked skins inside out and gently wring out. Freshly removed skins do not need soaking, you just need to remove pieces of fat, muscles, films from the mezra with a blunt knife. Now you know how to process the skin, which means you can approach the next step.

Skin degreasing

Prepare a soap solution at room temperature. For 5 g of powder, you need to take 4 liters of water. Put the skins in the solution for 20 minutes, lightly crushing them with your hands. After that, rinse them in cold water, wring out and turn the skins inside out with fur.

dressing skins by pickling

For dressing skins, you need to make a pickel. Take a bowl, pour 20 ml of vinegar into it, add 40 g of salt and a liter of water. For 1 kg of skins, 10 liters of pickel will be needed. skins immerse in the solution with the flesh outward. For thin skins (rabbit, hare, juvenile muskrat), 3 hours of soaking in the solution is enough, for skins of medium thickness (young sable, large fingerlings of muskrat, squirrels) - 6 hours, for thick skins (muskrat and adult sable, fox) - 12 hours . Cover the basin with a lid so that it does not smell of vinegar.

After this time, take out the skins, wring them out with your hands, fold in half the skin to the skin in a pile and put it on the bed under oppression for half the pickling time.

Drying skins

Dry the skins at room temperature on the rules with the fur inside. As soon as they dry a little, you can begin to knead them. Remove the skins from the rules and remember them as if you were washing a handkerchief. Then put the skin back on the rule and rub off as it dries. As a result, the dry skin after kneading should become soft, pleasant, fluffy. If it or individual parts remain rigid, then it must again be put on the rule with the flesh outward and grease the unfinished places with a pickle. Dry again and wash the skin. Repeat this treatment until each skin is soft and fluffy.

Skin neutralization

When the skins become soft, you can proceed to the neutralization procedure. It involves immersing products in a hyposulfite solution for 1.5-2 hours. The solution is prepared as follows: 50 g of hyposulfite is mixed with 30 g of salt and poured with a liter of water. Then the skins must be rinsed in soapy water, squeezed out, turned inside out, dried and mashed.

Skin tanning

Tanning skins must be approached responsibly, as this operation can adversely affect their quality. To do this, you need to lubricate the mezdra with a tanning brush. You can buy it at the pharmacy or make it yourself. For the tanning agent, you will need to pour 500 g of oak or willow bark into a container and pour a liter of water. Then boil the mixture and leave to infuse for a day. Strain the broth through cheesecloth and grease the skins with it. Then dry them and wash them.

Oiling skins

Be sure to fatten the skins. This procedure will make them soft and elastic. Dilute 50 g of powder in 300 ml of warm water, add 50 g of fish oil and 10 drops of ammonia. Mix the ingredients well and add another 500 ml of water. Moisten the skin with a fat emulsion and hang the skins to dry on rules. Then stretch the products and wring them out. That's all, the skins are ready.

Now you know how to dress skins, but if you are still not confident in your abilities, then it is better to watch the video, then the process will become more understandable.

Many farmers, hunters, and just villagers who grow fur animals on their personal plots face the problem of where to put the skins. There used to be reception points, but now they don’t exist, and it’s a pity to throw them away, but you don’t know how to process them at home either.

What to do? Learn dressing and tanning. At the moment there is a lot of literature and videos who will be able to guide you through all the stages of processing hides and skins. Who can refuse a fur coat made from the fur and skins of their pets, which would be wasted?

In fact, fur products require high-quality processing in order to last a long time. Properly dressed leather is a guarantee that the product will not be afraid of pests, and that it will not be able to have a negative impact environment. Dressing skins involves the use of chemically active substances that can seriously damage human health, which is why it is necessary to carefully protect yourself from their effects.

There are several simple ways to dress skins at home, allowing everyone to try their hand at this craft. It is necessary to maintain the high quality of raw materials so that they are suitable for further use.

The whole dressing process can be divided into three stages:

  1. preparation of raw materials;
  2. dressing of raw materials;
  3. final finishing of raw materials.

The whole process of dressing skins begins with their careful selection and weighing. First, you need to sort them by thickness and size for more convenient processing. They should then be weighed to determine the correct amount of chemicals required to process the hides.

If the raw material is fresh, then it must be cleaned of subcutaneous fat, meat and fat residues. Then it should be cooled down. After cooling, sprinkle raw materials with non-iodized salt, which absorb moisture and give it more strength. This stage can take several weeks or sometimes even a month.

After all procedures, the skin should become soft and thin. In order to get the highest quality product at the output, the best way would be to use the skins of animals aged from six to eight months.

flushing

After the required period has passed and all the moisture has come out of the skins, the process of soaking and washing begins. He takes place in several stages:

  • first soak the skins in water for four to five hours in clean running water;
  • then lower it for twelve to twenty hours into a saline solution, which is mixed in a ratio of 1:20, where 20 liters of water account for 1 kg of salt.

For one kilogram of skins weight, 8 liters of this solution are allocated. You can understand that the soaking process was successful by the condition of the skin. It should become elastic and soft, and subcutaneous layer should separate easily. Otherwise, the soaking process should be repeated until the desired result is obtained. But it is worth remembering that with a long stay in the water, raw materials may start to rot, so you should be especially careful, and if possible, consult an experienced craftsman.

Mezdrenie

The skinning process consists in removing the fat layer under the skin. It is either cut off with a dull blade or a sharpened knife. Sometimes craftsmen advise using a rotating circular knife. Care must be taken when skinning so as not to damage the raw material. It is worth noting that the skinning for all skins is the same. It doesn't matter what size it is or what animal it belonged to. Dressing will be the same, regardless of that. In order to simplify the process of skinning, you can use a blank and wood dust.

The cut skin is put on a blank, and a layer of subcutaneous fat is removed with a well-sharpened knife from the back to the head, and then from the abdomen to the withers. The mezdra is torn off by such movements to the skin. To facilitate the process, the skin can be sprinkled with sawdust. They dry the skin very well and do not allow the knife to slip. The main thing is to cut shallowly, because if you scrape to the hair follicles, then the fur will climb during dressing.

Shedding skins can be seen immediately - blue spots remain on the skin. This means that the animal has not yet gained full fur. With certain skills, the process does not take very long, but at first it will be quite troublesome, and there will also be a risk of damaging the raw materials. Therefore, without experience, it is better not to take on the skinning and dressing of expensive skins. You can start with small animals, such as moles. Their skin is not as large as that of a fox, sheep and goat, and the cost of a mistake is much less.

skin hide dries very easily. After airing in a couple of minutes, it will already be completely dry. It is not difficult to notice high-quality raw materials - after dressing it will look like suede and will not have to be processed to give it an external gloss.

Washing and pickling

At this stage, dressing the skin at home will not take much time. After the process of skinning, a prerequisite is to rinse the raw materials in solution. For its preparation, various detergents are usually used, but without strong chemicals and mixed with salt in a ratio of 3 kg per liter of detergent and 20 kg per liter of salt. Raw material is placed for five to ten minutes in solution, and then immersed in pickling solution.

Raw materials must be immersed in a solution of a mixture of acid and salt. The acid makes the fibers more flexible. After undergoing pickling, the skin can be stretched as you like. Usually acetic and formic acids show the best pickling results. The solution is made from 50 g of salt and 15 g of acetic acid or 5 g of formic. The raw material is immersed in this solution for twelve hours, constantly stirring in it. At the end of the term, the readiness of the raw material can be checked by stretching and bending. After unfolding, a strip should remain at the fold.

How to skin?

Before she starts, she needs go through the tanning process. First you need to prepare a solution consisting of water, potassium chromium alum or aluminum alum. They are purple crystals. The dosage of these substances is 7 g per 1 liter of water. Also be sure to add salt, in the amount of 60 g per 1 liter of water. The optimum temperature for this solution will be 25-30 degrees Celsius.

The raw material must be rinsed well before the procedure, and then immersed in the solution. During the soaking of the raw material in the solution, it must be constantly stirred. After twelve to fifteen hours of tanning at elevated temperatures, the skin should become strong and hard.

Drying

The raw material is placed on long slats connected by a belt. Next, the raw material is put on the slats completely, and then the slats are stretched. The bar is fixed at the required level. On such a device, you can dry the skin of any size. It is enough just to increase the size of the rails.

How to make a goat skin at home

For many, it is no secret that goats and sheep are raised not only for their milk and meat. Sheep wool is very valuable as a material. But it takes a lot of skill to make it right. Beginners in this business will almost certainly not succeed, so it is worth taking on sheepskin dressing only if you have self-confidence and, most importantly, experience.

Sheepskin dressing is a similar process as described above, with only a few differences. The first thing to be done is to remove the skin from the sheep (we will not touch on the dressing of the skin of a goat, it is quite different in the process). It can be removed by cutting in three places:

  • from one hind leg to the second hind leg through the tail;
  • from the metacarpal joint of one front leg to the same joint of the second front leg through the chest;
  • from the throat through the belly to the tail.

The most convenient thing is to start skin the front. For convenience, you can help yourself with a knife, as if pulling the skin towards you. They can also cut large tendons, but this should be done very carefully so as not to damage the fur itself. Fat should remain on the fur of the animal, and it should be cut off only during the skinning process.

When you remove the skin from the front and reach the back, for ease of removal, you can cut the skin near the genitals. After the removal is completed, the raw material should be hung on the frame so that it dries and does not lose its shape.

The highest quality sheepskin is obtained by dressing immediately after removal. But if this is not possible, then you can preserve the material. It should be said that the process of dressing the skin of a fur animal is a very laborious process and therefore, other things being equal, it is better to entrust this work to the master.

You can save the skin through dry-salted preservation. At the moment, the majority prefers this particular method of preservation. It is very similar to the salting of the skin. The material must be laid out on the floor, fur inside. Scrape off the rest of the meat with a knife (carry out the skinning), and sprinkle the skin with salt, especially carefully the edges. After that, the material should be folded in the form of an envelope, then folded in half.

The best thing is to place the skin in a container where it will dry out and soak up the salt for a few days. Then the raw material should be hung on a horizontal bar in a dry, unventilated place. A closet or attic is great. In this state, the raw material can be for a very long time, the main thing is that the moth does not start. If the skin is poorly salted, then it can prohibit, so do not be lazy salt the material. In order to determine the condition of the skin, you can periodically pull out the hairs from it. If the raw material is wet, then the hair will pull out easily.

And directly all the stages of the material processing process are described above in this article. Let's briefly go over them:

  • washing;
  • mezdrenie;
  • washing;
  • pickling;
  • tanning;
  • drying.

People have been wearing animal skins for centuries to protect from the cold. They accompanied human civilization along the entire path of its development, protecting and ensuring survival. Now furs have become just an expensive accessory, perhaps it’s even good that a person no longer needs to protect himself from the cold by killing animals?

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