7-DAY ANIMAL USE INTENSIVE VIRGINIA

Join me in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia for 7 days of animal processing, deer skin tanning and soft-leather sewing

This is the first time I'm offering my 7-Day Animal Use Intensive in the US! It takes place at Joe Flowers' home in the Appalachian terrain of Virginia, the same beautiful riverside property where we ran Fish, Fur and Traps.

Have you ever wondered what happens to the parts of an animal that don’t make it onto your grocery store shelves? Or how you can turn a raw skin into leather?

This 7-day course will give you the knowledge you need to process an animal efficiently and use as much of it as possible! You will then have the opportunity to turn a raw skin into soft, chamois-like leather and learn the sewing techniques best suited to making this type of leather into beautiful, usable products.

Animal Processing:

This part of the course will introduce you to which parts of an animal are useful for which products and how to preserve them until you can use them. We will cover basic butchery for both food and utilitarian items, as well as often-overlooked parts. Some examples of what will be covered include:

• Organs: Remove, sort, and clean edible and utilitarian organs, such as brains for tanning the skin, the bladder for water bags, and intestines for thread.

• Skin: Remove the skin, de-flesh it, and preserve it for later use and for making hide glue.

• Meat: Removing the meat and identifying which cuts suit different uses. How to debone, make roasts, jerky, and soup meat—basic meat preservation.

• Fat: How to render fat for preservation.

• Bones: How to separate joints, use bones as food, and make tools from bones, such as skin-processing tools, awls and needles, fishhooks, harpoon and arrow points, and jewelry.

• Sinew: How to remove, clean, and preserve both backstrap and leg sinew, and how to process it later into fiber for sewing, bowstrings, hafting, bow backing, etc.

• Hooves: How to process the hooves for decorative items or hoof glue.

• Antlers: If antlers are present, how to remove them and how best to work with them.

  
  

* Multiple levels of technology, from stone to steel, will be covered.

Deer Skin Tanning:

Learn to produce incredibly soft, strong, and durable leather from raw animal skin using one of humankind’s earliest tanning technologies! The tanning section of this course will focus on tanning deer skins using a variation of fat tanning that uses lecithin and oil* as the dressing agent. The class will cover de-fleshing, de-graining, alkalining to remove ground substance, dressing, softening, and smoking the skins.

Bag Making:

The last section of the course covers one of the most practical, useful, yet underrated items you can make from leather: a bag. You will learn a variety of stitches suited to soft, oil-tanned leather, basic patterning concepts, and how to choose the right stitch for different seams. You can also use sinew and intestine thread made earlier in the course to sew part of the bag.

After completing this course, you will have the skills and confidence to process animals, tan skins, and produce functional works of art of your own!

* The use of brains or egg yolks as an alternative dressing agent will be covered.

Please note that this course requires a reasonable level of fitness. I will teach proper technique and timing with the skins, but you will need to be on your feet and active for 6 to 8 hours per day.

Please discuss any serious injuries with me before booking the course.

Additional Information:

Duration: 7 days (Saturday, April 24th, 09:00 am – Friday, April 30th, 5:00 pm).

Max number of participants: 14

Prerequisites: None, this workshop is suitable for ages 18+.

Food: The course is fully catered, with main meals made from the animals we process during the course – using the whole animal.

Location: Galax, Virginia, USA

Price: $1,499

Payment: Pay by credit card or choose Klarna to set up a payment plan.

Venue: Nestled deep in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, the Lodge sits where the New River and Little River meet. The land surrounding it opens into sweeping mountain views, forested trails, rocky riverbanks, and hidden pockets of wilderness, with opportunities for snorkeling, kayaking, canoeing, fishing, or simply wandering the woods during downtime.

Accommodation: Camping is available on site for both tents and vehicles, with potable water, porta-potties, an outdoor shower, and an old-school indoor shower in the Lodge. Electricity is available for charging, though cell service is limited. For those seeking more comfort, hotels and mountain Airbnbs are just 15 minutes away.

Included: All course materials and food.

Not included: Off-site accommodation.

Instructor: Theresa Emmerich Kamper · Host: Joe Flowers, Bushcraft Global

A bit about me:

I'm an avid practitioner of traditional living skills and various forms of primitive technology. I grew up in the USA's Rocky Mountains, where backpacking, hunting, and fishing are deeply rooted in the culture. This passion led me to experimental archaeology, where I earned a PhD from the University of Exeter in the UK.

My work has appeared in documentaries and popular TV shows, including Alone Season 8 and Surviving the Stone Age. I've been tanning skins using traditional methods for over 30 years. Learning to tan was a natural extension of my desire to use as much of an animal as possible, and it also produced a beautiful end product.

In my instruction, I share a wide range of information—from the intricate details of skin morphology to helpful tips for dealing with the numerous, frustrating problems often encountered when you're first learning to tan. Check out all my courses here.