The Sheepskin Tanning Bundle
Learn to tan sheepskins online | at your own pace
in two hide tanning methods
What Does it Mean to Tan Sheepskins?
Hide Tanning is the traditional craft of turning an animal hide into a leather or textile.
Unlike modern industrial leather tanning, the at-home craft of hide tanning does not use chromium or other harmful chemicals: we use natural ingredients like bark, smoke, and fat to transform hides.
In North America, millions of sheep are raised on farms and harvested for meat each year. But only a tiny fraction of their hides get tanned. Instead, hides usually go to a local landfill, or at best, a compost pile.
That’s where The Sheepskin Tanning Bundle comes in.
If you live within driving distance of a farm or abattoir, you can find
I’m Mara and this is Fern + Roe Folk Tannery.
We tan sheepskins and other hides here on Vancouver Island.
Every hide is tanned by hand. Every tanning ingredient comes directly from the earth.
I met hide tanning 15 years ago when I was living on a small island in the north Pacific.
I had dropped out of university, disillusioned that my environmental studies degree was more about how to perform in a board meeting than about how to tend the land.
On that island, I became involved in a deer cull - a hunting project to remove invasive deer from an ecosystem that was damaged by their presence.
It was my first experience of ecological restoration. And it was done through hunting.
It showed me it’s possible for humans to repair the damage we’d done.
It showed me that death is a necessary part of nature.
And it showed me that making use of all parts of an animal is crucial for living well.
I didn’t know it then but…
Hide tanning is the missing ingredient from the sustainability conversation.
Because hide tanning is what creates both ecological and somatic sustainability.
Ecological because it
What you Get in the Sheepskin Tanning Bundle
Hide tanning doesn’t have to look like this:
✘ spending hours and hours scraping
✘ breaking your back lifting and softening
✘ getting bald patches from wool falling out
✘ not knowing when a hide is done
✘ relying on store-bought ingredients
✘ using expensive power tools
✘ measuring out complicated recipes
✘ winding up with stiff leather
Instead, it can be straightforward and doable.
So that hide tanning can do for you what it does best:
get you grounded
connected to the land
and aligned with how humans move and live best.
What You’ll Experience
✔️ Go from feeling tentative about the tanning process to certain of each step
✔️ Receive the nourishing and strengthening of hide tanning movements in your body
✔️ Connect with the more-than-human world in a real, pragmatic relationship
✔️ Increase your resilience and self-efficacy - our ability to take on anything and thrive
Who This is For
✔️ You know the profound meaning in animal and craft stewardship
✔️ You want to build physical strength and create something with your hands
✔️ You care for the land and want to engage in tangible reciprocity
✔️ You want guidance in a craft so you don’t have to do it alone
Important Notes
Your purchase includes lifetime access to this digital product
Tools, hides, and ingredients are not included in the price, but are available for our students any time
You’ll want to build a scraping beam and a hide frame to begin tanning (we show you how in the course)
What’s Included
✔️ Over 70 how-to videos
✔️ Start to finish guidance: from equipment to tanning to caring for sheepskin leather
✔️ Tips on sourcing hides and preserving hides before you tan
✔️ In-depth instruction on two tanning methods: bark-tanning and combination alum-smoke-tanning
✔️ Exclusive access to purchase untanned sheep skins from Fern + Roe for your own practice
Check out What you’ll Make ⤵︎
Anyone can tan a hide.
(yes that means you)
Our ancestors practiced this craft for millennia
(and they didn’t have power tools or shelf-stable orange liquids).
High-quality + plush sheepskins aren’t made with complicated ingredients
or through a one-thousand-step process.
They’re made by a systematic approach
- with clear knowledge of how hide tanning works.
How to Get Started:
Know your Tanning Ingredients + Tools
Your bark-tanned sheepskin rug
(yep, you’re getting a brown {shearling} sheepskin in the Hide Club Kit!)
Your smoke-tanned sheepskin rug
White {lofty} wool, white leather
If you’re thinking about hide tanning, then hide tanning is for you
Hide tanning is as ancient as our first ancestors.
It is humanity’s first craft - how we clothed ourselves to travel continents and thrive.
But it’s more important today literally than ever.
I mean that.
Our ancestors didn’t have cell phones, infinite scroll, and keyboards.
They didn’t have perfectly-warm houses.
But they had stamina. And strength. And yes even regulated nervous systems.
They got all that from craft - like hide tanning.
We need hide tanning not just to make plush sheepskins (which you will)
But to hold onto our humanity in an unstable world.
Wet-scraping - the first step
Stretching a smoke-tanned sheepskin