I have Alum!!!

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Cool! Looks like your salt should be a fine-ground non-iodized salt. Pickling or canning salt, but not rock salt. Non-iodized table salt may have anti-caking ingredients in it that you don't want, so it should be avoided, though some people apparently use it anyway. Sea salt is not pure; it contains many natural minerals that are good for you but not necessarily good for your furs. Pickling/canning salt is particularly pure from what I've read, so it will not discolor your furs or have other unexpected results. :)

Good luck and keep us posted! I hope eventually to start tanning myself!
 
I now have pickling salt, I found them both at Bulk Barn (Thanks Maggie!). Unfortunately I won't be able to get to the buns today, hopefully some time this weekend. I know they won't be prime pelts as the buns will only be about 11-12 weeks but we'll see how they turn out.

Darn traffic out there today. I had to go to Guelph, then Orangeville, then Alliston before coming home to Mansfield, took me a couple of hours longer then I thought so the buns will not be boarding the bus to camp today. Long weekends around here can be a pain....
 
you are in mansfield?

My family farm was just outside rosemont

how cool is that :)
 
I meet people from all over the place that grew up around here. Absolutely lovely area, I love it here! I'm right on Airport Rd. just north of Mansfield. I wouldn't mind moving onto one of the backroads, though, and get away from this traffic.
 
Even if the pelts aren't prime you should still be able to get a nice, thin white leather from them.
 
Well, the pelts come out of the brine today. They were in there three days longer than the recipe says due to me being real busy at work but I don't think that will hurt them. They are squeezed out, rinsed and hanging up to dry. When they are nearly dry I'll have to work them in. I"m thinking that will be the hardest part.

Boy, do they look like crap when they're wet!
 
Well, they're done. They took a little longer then I thought to dry but I finally worked them out today. They didn't turn out too bad but not great but they weren't prime pelts to start off with. Anyway, I"m satisfied with my first attempt and learned a few things in the process.

1) It's work! Scraping the hides and then working them out at the end is hard on the hands. At least I can work them out at the end while watching tv.

2) I have to do a better job of scraping the inner layer off to get at the skin. This will make working the hide out much easier and make the skin look better. This was just laziness and impatience on my part and wanting to just get them done so I could see how they turned out.

I hesitated about posting this picture as they don't really look that good but anyway, here they are, two blue and two black. They're not trimmed and could use a little more work but they're pretty soft and I learned the process so I'm fairly happy. Now to send some more to camp and try again....

Thank you to everyone's advice on where to get salt and alum and generally for your support.
 

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Thanks, I"ve worked them a little more and a couple of them have turned out pretty soft. I"ve really learned that I need to do a better job of scraping the hides and that really affects the final quality of the hide. I was surprised how much I enjoyed doing this... now I need to get Rex rabbits.... oh no....
 

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