I would like to preface this by saying that I am by no means a professional in the field of tanning or leatherworking. What follows are merely the procedures I understand insofar as I understand them and I claim no responsibility if you poison or burn yourself following this extremely basic overview.
With that out of the way. There are a couple of different ways to Tan hide. Here I will briefly mention that Chromium salt tanning is the fastest method of tanning leather. Generally requiring only a few hours from recieving hides to a finished product. Indeed the majority of all leather products are made using this method. Unfortunately this method is extremely environmentally unfriendly and far too expensive for hobby work. Unless your planning to produce industrial quantities of leather it is not worth considering, sourcing that much chromium would be a nightmare.
Vegetable Tanning is next, it uses Tannin to cure the Hide. Tannin is a family of polyphenols traditionally sourced from tree bark, with different trees encouraging different properties within the leather.
Its far easier to source Tannin than it is to get your hands on Chromium Salts for what are hopefully obvious reasons. You can also buy it in liquid or powdered forms at 30% and 60% concentrations respectively.
You'll want to take a few large drums and fill them with a mixture of Tannin and water in increasing concentrations, these are your tanning liquors. Take your hide and dunk it in salt to kill any microbes, leave it to rest a while, then clean the hide and dump it in a vat of hydrated lime. The lime will break down any fat or hair fibres present within the hide. Mechanical motion will make this happen faster but I'd avoid doing it by hand. Less toxic does not mean not toxic.
After the hides have been soaked, neutralise any lime residue with boric acid, dry the hides and then dump them into your "softest" (least concentrated) tanning liquor. The low concentration prevents the hides surface from tanning too quickly to allow time for the inner structures of the hide to be penetrated.
The hides longest soak will be in your softest liquor. After the first soak, remove and strain your hide of excess liquid then move it to a harsher liquor. Continue increasing concentration and decreasing soak intervals until you get your desired colour and texture, then leave the hide to fully dry for a few days.
The final step of the process is to treat the hide with either vegetable oil or rendered animal fat, this will correct any stiffness after dehydration without allowing water to ruin your hide. Then just wax, measure and cut for use. You now have your own custom leather.
These kinds of leather products are luxurious but are very slow to produce. Even at a brisk pace your looking at a month of your hide soaking in liquor vats. In addition to this, the process is closer to art than science. Every tannery uses its own liquors with bespoke proportions, concentrations and soak intervals and nobody shares their recipes. You WILL ruin your first few hides just figuring things out. Finally, while far easier to establish than a Chromium Bath vegetable tanning is still a considerable financial investment for the space to store your curing hides if nothing else.
If you're after a quicker, cheaper method and you're not afraid to get (very) dirty I'd suggest brain tanning.
This method uses the emulsifying agents contained within an animals brain to cure its hide and is a resource efficient but labour intensive way of producing leather. You will however require access to the full carcass to do this, sourcing just the hide isn't enough. You'll also need wood to smoke the hide.
Your step one is to scrape off any remaining fatty tissue from the bottom of the hide. Once you've defleshed the hide you should soak it in warm water for two to three days. This helps soften the hide to make further cleaning easier.
When the hide has been softened, scrape off the epidermis including any hair, then flip the hide and remove the first layer of the mucous membrane. This is the white stringy stuff where the hide once attached to the muscles. Keep scraping until the back of the hide has a finer texture, then let it rest.
Excess moisture inside of the hide at this stage will make the resultant leather stiff and inflexible. To avoid this you'll want to wring the hide after scraping. One fun way to do this is to tie the hide to a pair of parallel poles and twist them to extract excess moisture, get a friend to help you with this if you can and try not to damage the hide.
Then comes the messy part. You're going to want to grind the animals brains and mix them into a solution of 5 parts warm water to 1 part brain by weight. I have heard this described as a "brain milkshake" so you can imagine the consistency.
Submerge the skin in your brain milkshake and work the emulsifiers into the skin by hand, gently stretch and massage the hide until the hide is consistently pliable, then leave this to drip dry. After drying, feel the hide, if the texture feels patchy or inconsistent, resubmerge for another soak in the brain milkshake, otherwise you can let it dry one final time.
Then comes the stretching. Get together with a few friends and stretch the hide out across a rigid wooden object, you're aiming for a 15% increase in size from its resting dimensions. Repeat until the hide is nice and flexible, then tie it to a pole and hold it out over a fire of partially rotten wood to smoke your leather. The sort of wood you're looking for will produce smoke without visible flame and is generally somewhat damp. Smoking is vital to waterproofing the leather and different wood cultivars will stain the hide with a colour comparable to the colour of the wood itself, something to keep in mind for stylistic puposes.
If all goes well you should end this process with thin but servicable leather, certainly less durable than other methods but absolutely suitable for day to day wear. There is also some appeal to the simplicity of the process. This leather could be prepared by hand in anywhere with access to game, wood and water. Easily the most accessible and environmentally friendly tanning method, though not for people with sensitive stomachs.
Whatever you choose to do, I wish you good luck with your latest project.
Now if you excuse me, my little sister is screaming at me from the next room over, apparently her face has fallen off again.
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