Stretching
The next step is stretching/drying. This is time sensitive, and has to be done from start to finish without stopping. The drying hide is continuously pulled and stretched in all directions, which lubricates the fibers of the hide with the oil of the dressing, and ensures that the fibers stay lubricated. This may be done on a rack with a stretching tool, or by hand. Often the hide is stretched against a steel cable or a rounded steel or wooden blade (with care not to cut the hide). This must be done until the hide is completely dry and no longer cool to the touch or else the finished buckskin will be stiff, and will have to be dressed and stretched over again.
Read more about this topic: Buckskin (leather)
Famous quotes containing the word stretching:
“There was now no road further, the river being the only highway, and but half a dozen log huts, confined to its banks, to be met with for thirty miles. On either hand, and beyond, was a wholly uninhabited wilderness, stretching to Canada.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“O sleep, O gentle sleep,
Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down
And steep my senses in forgetfulness?
Why rather, sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs,
Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee,
And hushed with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber,
Than in the perfumed chambers of the great,
Under the canopies of costly state,
And lulled with sound of sweetest melody?”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“In the continual enterprise of trying to guide appropriately, renegotiate with, listen to and just generally coexist with our teenage children, we ourselves are changed. We learn even more clearly what our base-line virtues are. We listen to our teenagers and change our minds about some things, stretching our own limits. We learn our own capacity for flexibility, firmness and endurance.”
—Jean Jacobs Speizer. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Collective, ch. 4 (1978)