Traditional Tanners

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Traditional Tanners Contact information, map and directions, contact form, opening hours, services, ratings, photos, videos and announcements from Traditional Tanners, Brand, Ashland, OR.
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09/17/2026

Open to all goats and sheeples. Highest quality, totally natural and 100% washable. No surprise fees, no pre-fleshing, no pre-payment, 2-3 month turnarounds and cheap shipping both ways.

We tell you every single ingredient we use. Find all the deets at braintan.com/sheep (link in bio).

09/15/2026

Learn easier and totally natural ways to tan hides using tannin from plants 🪴 hair-on & hair-off.

It’s quite easy and fun to tan along from your own kitchen using the provided materials kit. Join people from all over the world 🌎 for 4 or 5 one hour zoom sessions or follow along on your
own schedule using the recordings.

Courses range from $162 to $178 and you’ll receive expert state of the art instruction with Matt Richards, tanner for 37 years.

Tan deer 🦌 goat 🐐 sheep 🐑 rabbit 🐇 or just about anything into beautiful leather or hair-on hides.

Participants range from novices to tannery professionals, ranchers, homeschoolers, wild shepherdesses, survivalists, leathercrafters, hobbyists and people who teach tanning in their own communities. Over 1000 students from dozens of countries and six continents have joined us so far. Nobody from Antarctica yet (sad!)

Start with “Basics” as it’s the pre-requisite for “Hair-on”, a
building block, and significantly different than what you’ll find elsewhere. Next round is at 6 pm pacific time starting November 22nd 2026. Classes are structured so that they are novice friendly but also valuable for experienced tanners.

There are so many hides going to waste! Learn the magical transformative art of hide tanning and turn them into beauty that honors the animals. Links for registration in bio.

09/06/2026

Went to Iowa to do some learnin with Trent from Primal Skinz Hide Work. We dryscraped our hair on buffalo hides for many years but the reality is that most bison hides that are available, and the ones most people want, are much bigger and thicker than what people did traditionally. Young females that require very little thinning is what they tanned and they often removed the spine, one of the thickest parts to make it easier - cause people were practical. This makes thinning with a dryscraper quite reasonable.

Larger older males are a different story. They can be up to an inch thick In places and they were not tanned as robes or rugs in old days. But that is what is mostly available now and mostly what people want (their hair is showier). We do 200 a year, and hand dryscraping them, besides not even being an historic tradition, is a quick rode to carpel tunnel. So we shave them with a shaving wheel, a relatively simple tool that is much easier on the body, though still highly skilled.

It’s hard to find people to teach you how to use them well. The hair-on tanning trade is very self protective - family businesses passed down through generations that don’t want competition. I’m self taught and I know there are details I could be better at, like consistent sharpening. There are guys who do this type of shaving all day long for years. At most hair on tanneries this is the main job - thinning hides with a shaving wheel.

I’ve been looking for years for opportunities to get better and recently found this cat Trent on Facebook who actually knows how to shave and how to teach (break things down into simple parts), so I arranged a one on one with him out in Iowa. Definitely got some great tips and highly recommend. Good people and an excellent teacher.

If you want to do hair on tanning on a regular basis, even if you are going to tan with smoke, tannin or alum this is the tool you want to master - especially for skins with any extra thickness like deer, axis deer, cows, bison, beaver etc. You can still tan them with totally natural ingredients and it’s much more sustainable physically. Trent teaches group classes and has some great videos on Facebook.

07/16/2026

Renato stripping bark for leather tanning way up the tree. The younger trees have thinner bark but you can get them to peel 25’ up the tree when the conditions are good. The thicker bark on older trees has more of the brittle exterior bark so it tends to break off vertically more easily (so you can’t get it to run quite as high).

People always asks if this kills the trees 🌳, and the answer is ‘it is supposed to’, but doesn’t actually seem to be! We get permission from Mendocino Redwood Companyy to remove tan oak bark from sites they are going to log. They log the redwood and Douglas fir, but not the tan oak as it doesn’t have a market. So they want to reduce the tan oak numbers so that as the site regrows the tan oak will be in balance with the next generation of Douglas fir and redwood rather than taking over. Normally the tan oak has an X chopped in it and round up is squirted into the cambium to kill a certain percentage of trees. This is normal practice around here. Even the forest service does it.

In theory, by harvesting the bark we would be accomplishing the same thing without the herbicide. However, they’ve gone back to the places we harvested five years ago when we first started and the trees are green and doing fine, surprisingly. They are letting them be for now to see what happens. 🤷‍♂️

07/12/2026

Harvesting bark for leather tanning. It’s that time of year 😃

07/05/2026

Learn easier and totally natural ways to tan hides using tannin from plants 🪴 hair-on & hair-off.

It’s quite easy and fun to tan along from your own kitchen using the provided materials kit. Join people from all over the world 🌎 for 4 or 5 one hour zoom sessions or follow along on your own schedule using the recordings.

Courses range from $162 to $178 and you’ll receive expert state of the art instruction with Matt Richards, tanner for 37 years. Tan deer 🦌 goat 🐐 sheep 🐑 rabbit 🐇 or just about anything into beautiful leather or hair-on hides.

Participants range from novices to tannery professionals, ranchers, homeschoolers, wild shepherdesses, survivalists, leathercrafters, hobbyists and people who teach tanning in their own communities. Over 1000 students from dozens of countries and six continents have joined us so far. Nobody from Antarctica yet (sad!)

Start with “Basics” as it’s the pre-requisite for “Hair-on”,, a building block, and significantly different than what you’ll find elsewhere. Next round is at 11 am pacific time (evening for Europeans) starting August 3rd 2026. Classes are structured so that they are novice friendly but also valuable for experienced tanners.

There are so many hides going to waste! Learn the magical transformative art of hide tanning and turn them into beauty that honors the animals. Links for registration in bio.

Visited macgregorandmichael and British Pasture Leather while we were in England. Neil and Valerie do amazing leatherwor...
06/23/2026

Visited macgregorandmichael and British Pasture Leather while we were in England. Neil and Valerie do amazing leatherwork with Baker’s Tannery Colyton oak bark tan, Russia leather that was recovered from the 1786 shipwreck of the Metta Catharina after 220 years under the sea, and fine Italian vegtans. They are also just the nicest people and we had such a great connection with them. I had to get a piece of their work and so picked up a baker tannery oak bark belt, and Neil gave me a gorgeous piece of the Russia leather - which wow - is gold to me. Just amazing to be able to look at and feel leather from that time period. Hope to take one of their classes someday.

Then we blazed through the English countryside (sorry people) to Blenkinsop’s to visit with Alice and Sarah of British Pasture Leather. We are ever working on our finishing skills and Alice took us through the entire process of how their leather is finished from raw crust to Mulberry worthy. Just great. Reinforced that we need a rotary ironing/glazing machine if any of you have a spare?

Hey humans. There is a fantastic international hide week happening in Minnesota next month at . This is the largest and...
04/28/2026

Hey humans. There is a fantastic international hide week happening in Minnesota next month at . This is the largest and most thorough traditional tanning event we’ve seen in North America, with brain tanning, bark tanning, smoked moose tanning, Scandinavian fish skin tanning, moccasin making, beadwork, leathercraft etc. North House is bringing over from Sweden, Anishinaabe tanners from Canada, this guy Matt from Oregon and a lot of local talent like

There’s classes but there is also conference style presentations and talks in the evenings and a free conference day. Mostly this sold out very early on but they just released a couple spots in most classes that they had reserved.

I’m teaching a couple of new classes. One on leather finishing and another on chemistry and science of traditional tanning. Lots of people have taken basic brain or bark tanning courses over the years so I wanted to offer something new for you more experienced tanners so we can all up our game (and to get you to come 😃). I’m also giving a talk on what I don’t know (so much) and how there is just so much more to discover and rediscover in this craft.

So come on out, learn things, teach me some things, meet great people and we’ll jump in the lake.

04/15/2026

Learn easier and totally natural ways to tan hides using tannin from plants 🪴 hair-on & hair-off.

It’s quite easy and fun to tan along from your own kitchen using the provided materials kit. Join people from all over the world 🌎 for 4 or 5 one hour zoom sessions or follow along
on your own schedule using the recordings.

Courses range from $162 to $178 and you’ll receive expert state of the art instruction with Matt Richards, tanner for 36 years. Tan deer 🦌 goat 🐐 sheep 🐑 rabbit 🐇 or just about anything into beautiful leather or hair-on hides.

Participants range from novices to tannery professionals, ranchers, homeschoolers, wild shepherdesses, survivalists, leathercrafters, hobbyists and people who teach tanning in their own communities. Over 1000 students from dozens of countries and six continents have joined us so far. Nobody from Antarctica yet (sad!)

Start with “Basics” as it’s the pre-requisite for “Hair-on”, , a
building block, and significantly different than what you’ll find elsewhere. Next round is at 6 pm pacific time starting May 4th 2026. Classes are structured so that they are novice friendly but also valuable for experienced tanners.

There are so many hides going to waste! Learn the magical transformative art of hide tanning and turn them into beauty that honors the animals. Links for registration in bio.

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Ashland, OR
97520

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