Week32: Post-American Apparel
You got it folks, I finally finished my short shorts! I decided to not use the tradition thread of buckskin cord and a bone awl, and went with the more technological glovers needle and artificial sinew. Now, I have some deer sinew from that roadkill buck, who’s skin I now wear tightly around my groin. But when I went to Rabbitstick Rendezvous I heard Robin from Earth Knack do a presentation on “Buckskin Do’s and Don’t’s,” where she said not to use sinew on clothes because it gets to stiff if you get it wet… or something like that. She said to use buckskin cord, but I felt like I could get away with using artificial sinew since they make it out of nylon and it won’t get stiff and I feel too scared to use buckskin cord on my first pair. I stitched in this button with a little cat track on it:
I spent a day scraping the raccoon hide. Phew! What a job! I used stone tools to do that, and let me tell you… I had a hard time when I used the knife. I found a perfect rock in Shaun’s collection to do the job:
Periodically I would interupt him from making his hats and ask him some questions like, “Duh… Does this look right?”
This picture shows before I began:
This picture shows what it looked like when I finished:
In the end I had a bag of dried, fatty flesh, blood, fur and staples:
I didn’t finish scraping the face because it feels so stiff and you can’t really wrench on it the way you can with the rest of the hide. After I finish that, I will wash the hide to get the left-over fatty oils out of it, and then I will brain it, and than smoke it and than sew it into a Davey Crocket style hat.
The bad news? My motorhome keeps leaking! I guess the tarp must have torn somewhere up top. I have given in to it and just put buckets underneath the leaks.
Lastly, I have organized another Derrick Jensen talk here in Portland on December 19th (details to follow) and the third annual Nuclear Winter Formal for January 26th (details to follow). Stay tuned!
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Yes! I was there for the last Derrick Jenson talk and it was great, if a little cold inside! bbrrrrr… I wish I could make it back to Portland for this one… and the Nuclear Winter Formal, but maybe next year. The raccoon hide looks great, can’t wait to see the hat, and do you have a pattern for the shorts?
Hey, glad you enjoyed Derricks talk. I didn’t have a pattern for the shorts. I took a pair of American Apparel short shorts and held them against some other fabric, drew around them with a pen (adding 5/8 of an inch for the seams) and than cut the pieces of the fabric out. I sewed them together first to see if it would fit, and it sort of did. Than I took apart those shorts and lay the pattern pieces on the buckskin and cut them out. The waist was a little wierd so I cut a slit above each butt cheek to close it up a bit. It was still baggy and sort of low-cut and I don’t want to show off my butt crack so I made the waistband. I measured the shorts and they were like 34 inches (I am a 28-30) so they had 4 inches extra! I made the waist band only 30 inches (after sewing seams) and eased it onto the shorts, not stretching the waistband, but pulling the shorts in. In the end I finally nailed it. There is still a little loose-ness above my butt-crack, but the waistband makes it high enough to hide most of it. I wanted to be able to wear them with underwear on, and not showing, but in the back you can kind of see my underwhere. I may cut it again, but I am satisfied for now.