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America's Best Selling Tanning Guide. Over 165 photographs and illustrations bring you step-by-step from raw skin to velvety soft buckskin and then show you how to create beautiful garments and useful goods. You will also learn how to make rawhide and hide glue, tan in a wilderness setting and the best way to skin. History, humour and science make this book not only practical, but fun! Designed to be easily understood by the beginner yet rich with details for the experienced, this book teaches tanning as a natural process. No chemicals are needed! All the tools and materials are waiting around your home and land. While the tools are simple, having a great method is the key. This book has that method (see the following reviews). Buckskin is durable, soft, washable and warm. A hand-made garment for people all over the world for millennia, it breathes and stretches with your body, cuts the wind and won't tear on briars. It is excellent to wear hiking, hunting or around the house. Plus you don't need to hunt.… (more)
User reviews
The key is the subtitle: "How to Tan with Natural Materials." "Natural" means that they can be found in nature.
After three introductory sections [ "What exactly is
The gem of this book is called "The Basic Method" which is about 50 pages of well illustrated and well ordered methodical instruction. This section doesn't go into options, but presents the reader with what Richards says is an almost foolproof way to get a decent buckskin every time with natural [free] materials.
After this section Richards goes into other options of methods, resources, and techniques.
The work includes a reference section, a section on making primitive natural tools, hide glue, rawhide and sewing patterns.
Richards closes with a listing of resources cited in the book and where the reader can find them.