Timestamp: 26 of Fall, 517 AV (Late Afternoon)
Nya had herself a very large snakeskin and she didn’t want to waste it. Preserving skins was something she’d been told about and practiced, but not something she’d done with actual snake skins. She’d already tried several preservation tactics that had been more miss than hit but the Kelvic wasn’t ready to give up just yet. A wiser man than her had told her snakeskin did well under vegetable tanning and that’s the way she should go with it. A lot of snakes were taken in and around the settlement so she had lots of opportunity to try and tan the skins even if she ruined a few learning. The most important things she had…. a surface to tan on and the tanning formula she’d need since she was laying out the skin not soaking it in barrels. She had a log all laid out by the worktable that was roughly twice as long as the skin was and hewed off smooth to make a table of sorts for laying out her skin. Randal had helped her with that, trading work for meat, in the sheering off half the rounded log into a work surface she could use.
The Kelvic had assembled her tools. Nya had more tools now that she had picked up her order from the Mercantile and gotten her sewing, building, cooking, and campfire kits. She had a knife, nails, hammer, small rags, an assortment of stones to use as weights, and salt. The salt she’d had to buy from the Mercantile because the Kelvic had long since learned she didn’t have the patience to evaporate sea water to gain salt. James also traded a few of her belts for Alum that she could mix with oak bark to make her tanning solution. That was what she was going to do first.
Nya had already gathered buckets of oak bark from the trees higher up in the hills. They weren’t the sort of oaks she was used to back in Syliras. Instead they were the type of oak that one could strip bark off of in long sheets and have a spongy material Randal called ‘cork’. The Cork Oaks did well for what she wanted though…. the deep mixture in their bark that helped vegetable tan leather. From the Mercantile she’d purchased large oak barrels, two of them, and had oak bark soaking in them in salt water. The resulting ‘tea’ thickened daily until all she had to do was add alum and more salt to have her tanning solution. Rather than salting the whole barrel, Nya prepared tanning solution one batch at a time so she could frugally use the tea. In a small bucket she strained the bark out of the tea, added a cup of salt per gallon of tea and then a half a cup of alum. If she had hair she wanted burned off a skin, she’d add ash from her fireplace and just soak the skin in the mixture stirring it frequently.
But that’s not what she was doing this time. This time she was tanning snakeskin with the scales still on. The python she’d killed at The Syka Commons was colorful and would make interesting leather already patterned. Her idea was to try and preserve the skin to maybe make a colorful belt or even a bright sheath for someone’s Kukri. Nya wasn’t sure what she’d do with the leather, but she definitely wanted to make the skin into a leather.
The first thing she needed to do was make sure the entire snakeskin was split along the belly scales which were big bulky things. Because she’d skinned the snake and saved the meat, she had slit it from its vent to its chin, right along the belly so it should be perfect. Nya unrolled the skin scale side down and laid it along the log that she was going to use to work it. Once it was laid out, Nya took a dull knife (dull because sharp knives were too easy to cut through the delicate skin) and scraped what looked like leftover meat, sinew, and fat off the flesh. She wanted to avoid any holes because as she processed the skin the holes would get bigger, more noticeable, and less of the leather would be workable.
Once laid out, Nya knew she needed to afix the hide to the board. Taking her metal thumbtacks and her small hammer, Nya stretched out the skin and began pressing the tacks into the wood, hammering where she couldn’t press the tack in with her fingers alone. She laid the hide out with the snake facing down, tacking so she kept the scales straight – unstretched – and uniform. She put far more tacks in the tail section but spread them out as she moved forward towards the business end where the snake head used to be. She also made sure she had it tacked down straight then went back and added more tacks when she thought she had it perfectly aligned to dry straight.
Next she took out salt and spread it liberally over the hide. The idea, she knew, was to let it sit there until all the water in the snakeskin was gone. It would be best if it was dry and crunchy but not brittle. In Syliras, she’d never be able to tan the snake with any alacrity, but in Syka in the full sun she was able to let it lay just a bell or two and the skin would be prefect. Overnight would be too much because the hide could get so dried out that it would be brittle, crack, and fall apart.
Nya used the passing bells to stain her oak tea, mix alum in it, and cork it in a smaller flask ready to apply to the snakeskin when she was ready for the next step. When the skin was dry enough, it was time for the tanning solution. First Nya brushed all the loose salt off the skin with a small whisk broom and saved it in its own container for reuse. She wasn’t sure how many uses she’d get out of the salt, but it was better to reuse it as long as she could for tanning than waste it and have to buy new salt. Once the skin was clean of salt, dry, and bare… she was ready to dose it with solution.
1046 =20200/50,000