#Brain tanning hides by mattew richards how to
#Brain tanning hides by mattew richards skin

Now that she is an accomplished brain tanner (she also makes her own buckskin for clothing), Cronin offers classes to those interested in learning the craft. That provided Cronin an opportunity to procure plenty of brains and plenty of skins, and it also afforded her time to perfect her skill.

#Brain tanning hides by mattew richards skin

She initially offered to skin game in trade for hides that she could use to practice her craft, but after local butcher Chris Di’Michele of Deemo’s Meats saw how skilled Cronin was at skinning, he offered her a full-time job. Only a handful of people still have the skill to tan hides using traditional methods one of them is Harmony Cronin.Ĭronin studied with master tanners and learned the art primarily through trial and error, she says. This traditional method was used by many Native Americans for the preservation of buckskin with which to make clothing, but modern tanning methods in factories using chemical baths have largely replaced brain tanning. That’s what led her to tanning.īrain tanning is the ancient art of preserving animal hides using the emulsifying agents in brain matter, which helps break up the mucous membranes that cause animal hides to harden. After killing and skinning a rat, she decided to try to develop skills that would allow her to use every piece of a harvested animal, even the pelt of a marauding rodent.

She got her start in tanning from a humble source. She is especially interested in reviving traditional skin-tanning methods, including using the brains from an animal to soften and preserve its hide.

#Brain tanning hides by mattew richards how to

Like early homesteaders in the area, she found she could make a living from the land-or, in her case, from the wild animals that occupy the land north of America’s oldest national park.Ĭronin-a 27-year-old blonde, blue-eyed, and body-pierced evangelist for a modern back-to-the-land movement-can often be found in little Ennis, Mont., singing the praises of healthy, organic, free-range protein (read: wild game) and teaching others how to use an animal from its nose to its toes. Raised by a non-hunting family in Denver, Cronin spent her early 20s bouncing around the West, sleeping in the beds of friends’ pickup trucks and seeking the sorts of people and knowledge that she wasn’t exposed to earlier in her life. Harmony Cronin calls her vagabond beginnings on the fringe of Yellowstone National Park “trucksteading.”