About the Maker:
Hi There! I am Kara. I’ve been tanning hides for over ten years now and have been making art and crafts for as long as I can remember. When I was very little, my mom would give me a cup of water and a paintbrush to make designs on the cement and watch them evaporate with the sun. My grandma was always needlepointing and my great grandma made each of her great-grandchildren a hand-quilted pillow. I was very lucky in this way. I spent my childhood in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan where handcrafts, magic, and nomadic pastoralism were all very-much part of the day-to-day experience. I moved to the US when I was seventeen, experienced a great culture shock, guided canoe, backpacking and horsepacking expeditions, went to (but didn’t finish) grad school for children’s book illustration, and found one of my callings as a goatherd. Through it all, I was making art, but steadily veered in the direction of handcrafts. I love things that are beautiful and practical. My work is inspired by the colors and textures of my childhood, fresh goat’s milk in the mornings, hot bread, the sharp taste of pomegranate seeds, pine needles warmed by sunlight, the breath of a horse’s nose against my palm, the real behind the apparent, the memory of my grandma lightly running her fingertips along my inner arm, and so much more. I sew with a leather needle I inherited from my great-grandmother. Pasted on page of a family cookbook that was passed down to me is a recipe for tanning rabbits. This feels important to me—how I bumbled towards these synchronicities, I am grateful for it and want to share that with you. For me, this work creates space for conversation—with the landscape, with my ancestors (those who came before and those who will come after), with myself, with my gods/spirituality, and with culture—cultures that inspire me and that spark admiration within me, the culture of which I am currently a part, and the culture that I hope to move towards. The art I make is an act of remembrance and an act of hope. I am making things for the world I want to be in. Thank you for being here.
About the Process:
All of the hides on this site are tanned by me with intention and devotion. Before they are tanned, though, they are salvaged—mostly from dumpsters outside of slaughterhouses. I want to make this clear—all of the hides I work with are byproducts. None of these animals were raised for their skin alone. In fact, the hides are usually thrown away and would go to landfills if I didn’t dig them out of the dumpsters. If I am selling furs, they are from roadkill that I have skinned. There are lots of ways to tan a hide, but all of mine are bark or ‘brain-tanned.’ With brain tanning, one uses emulsified oils (sometimes brains but more often for me it’s egg yolks these days) and lots of elbow grease to soften a hide and smoke to keep it that way and to kill any bacteria. Bark tanning is the process of making and using a strong tannin-rich ‘tea’ from organic matter like bark or leaves to tan the hides. There are pros and cons to each process and I personally love both of them. I choose how I am going to tan a hide based on what I want to use it for and what is possible and practical for and on the landscape I am a part of when I’m tanning. In addition to bark, bark extracts (a dehydrated bark tea), and/or egg yolks, I also sometimes use salt and citric acid to help the process along. I hand wash all sheepskins multiple times with organic unscented dish soap or castile soap. This work is slow, time consuming, and, at times, challenging. I am very happy that I get to do it. If you are paying a lot of money for a sheepskin or hide, I encourage you to look into the process that is used. A lot of folks market their hides as ‘organic,’ ‘natural,’ or ‘vegetable tanned’ but they still use chemicals that are harsh on both the landscape and our skin in the process—especially to wash the hides/fibers. If you can’t find what you’re looking for on my site, I have some other trusted and talented tanners listed on my ‘useful links’ page.
