[The Sanctuary] For The Love Of Leather

by **Kavala** on November 2nd, 2013, 4:20 pm

Timestamp: 32nd of Fall, 513 AV.

It was tough being so pregnant. No one really let the Konti do what she wanted to do in terms of chores around The Sanctuary. Every time she lifted a hand here or picked up something heavy there, people were edging her out of the way, taking the burdens from her arms, and telling her to go relax, sit down, rest. She was frankly tired of the fuss and tired of doing nothing. Like it or not, there was not much she could do except escape to the lab, the phitlering lab, and work on some of her philters.

One thing The Sanctuary was running low on was Leather Conditioner for the tack. Kavala had plans later that day to go through the tack room and work on some of the training gear and harnesses that needed work. She was convinced that in hauling leather tack, rags, and a pot of conditioner around, no one would think twice. But first she had to make the conditioner. The stuff could be acquired in town, but Kavala was convinced the substance she bought there was not as good as what she could make at home in her own lab.

The basic recipe for Leather Conditioner was fairly easy to come by. It was just 50% tallow, 25 % beeswax and 25% lard. Of course, Kavala had to create the tallow and lard herself, but that was part of the whole process. Both were fat, the tallow coming from beef and the lard coming from pig. Kavala had both in the icehouse, the beef from a hanging cow that had been butchered just two days ago. The lard would come from a bucket of pig fat they had salvaged from cuts of pork they took from another swinging carcass as they took off meat to use in their day to day cooking.

Kavala decided to tackle the tallow first. She needed to take the suet, otherwise known as fat, and render tallow from it. So first she gathered her ingredients in the philtering lab. Tallow was perfect for a philtering project, a skill she enjoyed working on. Making a checklist, Kavala gathered beef fat – a large bucket of it -, a large stock pot, a dozen wide-mouthed jars, and cheesecloth. Once she had her equipment and ingredients assembled, Kavala went to work.

There were two methods to making tallow. One involved water and one did not. Kavala opted for the dry method since she wanted to reduce the chance the fat would go bad and later prove rancid. There was nothing worse than leather conditioner with the stench of rancid tallow. The Konti selected her fat carefully. She carved out the remaining carcass of beef, taking the best quality fat – the lean stuff – from around the kidneys. There were two reasons for this. Kavala didn’t want to make more work for herself in clean up because fat from that area was more pure, less intermingled with other flesh. She did have to remove the kidney in the area, but she set it aside for pie for later. The most difficult part of carving off the fat was the tricky dagger work she had to do, carefully inserting the edge of her blade into the thick silver connective tissue around the fat and removing it. The stuff was tough, inedible, and just needed to be gone.

Kavala made sure the beef fat was cold, thus easier to work with, and began to chop it into manageable chunks. Then she carefully trimmed off all the leftover bits of meat, bone, gristle and removed all the blood. When she was done she had a neat pile of fat that was bright yellow and really good looking in terms of quality. Once she had the fat processed, she got out her meat grinder and ground the fat through that, giving it the consistency of sausage stuffing or burger. She didn’t need to do this step, but the konti did it anyhow because it made the rending process go much faster and easier.

She dumped the shredded fat into a large stock pot and put it over the hearth in the philtering lab. She made sure the heat was very low so she could melt the fat very very slowly. Kavala knew she had several hours of rendering to accomplish so while she stirred the pot occasionally, she got ready to create some scents to fragrance her leather conditioner with. The Konti had been making tallow for a very long time. It was one of the first things Drykas children learned to make. They used the tallow as shortening, oil, in all their frying and even turned it into soap. The fat was incredibly useful and nothing was ever wasted.

by **Kavala** on November 3rd, 2013, 7:33 pm

While Kavala waited for the beef suet to render into tallow, she went ahead and ran back to the cold storage to again grab more pork fat. This time she trimmed around the kidneys again, but on pigs that section of fat was called Leaf Fat. It was called thus because a skilled person with a knife could remove it from the connective tissue without removing the kidney from the carcass and the fat mass flared out and looked a lot likea huge leaf. Kavala couldn’t get enough leaf fat for what she wanted to do from the size of the pig she had, so she in turn had to move to the fatback, which was the strip of fat between the skin and the muscle of the pig. There was less of it on the animal than there was leaf fat, but it always made up and augmented what she got from the leaf fat. Short work with a dagger, and Kavala had the fat liberated from both kidney and back, filling her bucket.

With this fat, she had a choice as well. She could go wet or dry. Wet rendering really caused the lard to have a less piggy flavor, look better color wise for baking, and had a higher smoke point, which was how hot it could be heated before it began smoking.. Rendering the lard in the dry method gave it a deeper color, lower smoke point, and had a lot more flavor. Regardless, unlike the beef fat she was rendering, the pig fat would stink once she got to cooking it.

When Kavala had enough fat in her bucket, she headed back to the philtering lab and chopped at the fat again, making it into manageable pieces. She was less concerned about removing tissue, blood, and meat because when one rendered pork fat, there was a side treat produced called a crackling that she’d get to share with everyone at dinner, probably as a topping to the pork roast they had planned. The cracklings were little bits of deep fried meat that were full of flavor and perhaps the best thing ever, putting even bacon to shame. Everyone would enjoy the bi-product of the lard making today, that much was certain.

Kavala took the fat pieces and ran them through the meat grinder. She churned the fat through by cranking the handle getting the sold pieces of fat back broken up into smaller more fine bits that would render better. Getting out a second stock pot, she filled the bottom with a quarter of a cup of water and then began to fill the pot with the ground pork fat. She hung it in the hearth by the beef fat, and made sure the fire was banked down so it was warm but not hot.

An hour later she checked it, not wanting the fat to burn. It had began to render down and the left over bits of tissue were separating out. Stirring the pork fat, she did the same to the beef fat as well, stirring it. She kept watch for two hours, and when she thought it was completely liquid, she got out two additional pans, hung colander strainers over them, and then lined the strainers with cheesecloths. Moving the beef stock first from the hearth, Kavala grabbed a huge ladle and begin ladling the liquid fat from the pot to the cheesecloth and began straining it. Once she had all the liquid stock in the colander or strained through to the pot below, she moved on to the pork fat.

Ladling it into the cheese cloth, she strained that as well, The cracklings weren’t crispy and well rendered like normal, they were instead the consistency of ground slightly cooked burger. She’d fix that though later, hitting them with grease in a skillet and serving them over the roast.

Once she had the beef and pork fats melted, strained, and waiting in liquid form, she got out her glass jars, and began filling them. Once full, she put a tight lid on them and then labeled each carefully, either lard or tallow. When she was done the counter was lined with dozens of jars, some pale white and some pale yellow. All were neatly labeled. Next Kavala reserved four jars each, and then carried the rest down to the cold storage and left them in the chilled area there. She had to make multiple trips with a basket in each hand filled with jars. It was a good workout, especially for a pregnant woman, but didn’t give her undue strain.

Next Kavala had to get the scent ready for her leather conditioner. She didn’t want to leave it just the natural smell of beef and pork, so she picked something that would smell good on a horse, on a man, and with the combined scents of sweat and hard work, maybe even dust. The perfect pick was sage. And Kavala had a ton of it drying. Sage was good for all sorts of things in the clinic. Sage could detoxify, and it also cleansed the blood and produced more calm, alert, and contented people. It acted as a antiperspirant if taken internally and tended to help female creatures – humans and konti included – dry up milk after they were done breast feeding. But most importantly, Sage had a unique property of being able to keep things from rotting or holding contaminating things. Wiping something down with sage oil tended to keep it from molding and rotting for long periods of time. That meant it was perfect for adding as component scent to the leather conditioner.

So sage it was. Kavala smiled, and headed to get the sage she had on hand.

by **Kavala** on November 3rd, 2013, 7:50 pm

And as it was, The Sanctuary had a good supply of dried sage on hand. Hung in bundles in the storage room off the lab, all Kavala had to do was go get a large basket of the pungent plant material and get the fire under the distiller going.

She did both, arranging the plants along side the distiller and getting ready to extract the oil. Getting down a huge earthen ware jug of already distilled water, Kavala filled up the tank of the distiller and then pulled the plant basket out of the tank and loaded it with the dried sage. Fresh sage would have been better to use, but it took far longer distilling tons of fresh sage over and over than it did packing the basket tightly with dried sage and distilling that. She could do one batch of the dried (using about four times the material) rather than four batches of bulky fresh sage to get the same amount of oil. It was a trade off but one Kavala was willing to make. She packed the tank with as much plant material as she could fit, careful to make sure that it was a not touching the sides and was hanging in its basket above the water line.

Kavala fed logs into the fire, bringing the heat up under the distiller, and began to keep an eye on the still. After a while the distillate started coming through the condenser and began to fill the separator. Kavala didn’t have to really do much to make that happen. But she did have to keep track of the water in the distillation tank and make sure she wasn’t going to run out. She also kept tabs on the water in the condenser so she could keep the cooling process going and not run the stile dry.

Once the condenser was full, she wanted to filter the collected oil. She got out her cheesecloth and covered another large wide-mouthed glass jar with the fabric. Then she partially disassembled the stile and filtered the finished oil through cheesecloth and into the jar. Kavala quickly screwed the metal lid onto her jar and lifted the glass to the light to inspect the oil. The glass she used was dark amber and she could see that the liquid was clear and debris free in its depths. It would keep for a year or two, unless she used it all, by just storing it in a dark place and opening it as little as possible.

Kavala then emptied the hydrosol which was a byproduct from distillation process into the distilled water container so she could reuse it in the next oil manufacture. Once she had the oil, she went back to the jars of tallow and lard she had reserved and left the container of oil with them.

Next she headed out to the small storage shed where she kept her beehive gear. In that shed contained several buckets of salvaged beeswax. It wasn’t the pure white comb used for making medicines and cosmetics but rather the excess comb that had been trimmed off when she was doing her hive inspections every other ten day and maintaining her bees. The comb was nasty looking stuff, but again Kavala wasn’t afraid of it. She grabbed the bucket and headed back to the philtering lab.

First things first. She needed to melt down the beeswax. She did so by reusing the stock pot she’d renderd the tallow in to dump all the beeswax in. Some of the wax had dead bees in it, drone comb that had been trimmed off from the main hive frames. Some of the wax was discolored by age as well. It wasn’t the best of stuff, but it was good enough for what she needed to use it for.

Kavala let the wax melt, which didn’t take long, and then peered distastefully into the mess looking at all the debris that shouldn’t be there. She got down some wooden molds that Aweston had made, just squared off boards that could be taken apart easily rather than be permanently affixed, and got them ready. She lined them with a paper that would hold up with hot wax and left the brick sized molds out on the counter. Then Kavala grabbed a ladle and began skimming the impurities off the top of the wax, knowing the top layer was extra moisture and dirt. When she got the visible debris off, she took the stock pot and began ladling the hot wax into the molds until enough of them were filled and enough wax was left in the stock pot melted to meet her needs.

She’d unmold the wax blocks later, but for now she reached for her tallow and lard.

by **Kavala** on November 3rd, 2013, 8:37 pm

The recipe for the leather conditioner called for 50% tallow, 25 % beeswax and 25% lard. So to the beeswax she had in the stock pot she added twice again as much tallow and twice again as much lard. She stirred the mixture thoroughly and vigoursly for almost a bell, waiting to see if the conditioner would get the consistency she wanted. It didn’t fail her. Once it was set up a bit more, Kavala reached for the sage oil she’d made, and began adding oil to the conditioner until the whole thing was perfume d and permeate with the scent. It wasn’t something the horses would object to either if their harnesses or saddles smelled funky.

Still stirring, the scents of sage seemed to waif up and fill her nose. She smiled, brought the spoon up out of the mixture, and looked for it to trace across the top when she drizzled the conditioner back into the pot. It did not, so she kept stirring. Periodically she’d lift the spook, let some drizzle back in, and simply waited for it to set up. When it was tracing correctly , the material that was rejoining the original pile would linger on the top as strands freestanding above the mixture before slowly sinking back in. That was what Kavala was looking for to happen before she could set up her jars of conditioner.

When it finally started tracing, Kavala paused and got down another bundle of jars, lids, and rings. She laid them out, the big wide-mouthed kind, and then began ladling the hot mixture into the glass. She got ten big jars of conditioner that way, and smiled when she stood back to admire her handiwork.

Carefully she sat down to label tags and then tie the tags around each jar of conditioner. This was going so well. Now all she had to do was make some saddle soap and then clean some tack – like all of it.

Making saddle soap was fairly easy. But Kavala was grateful for her philtering lab. If she didn’t have the facility, making the soap would have been a lot harder than it looked. So Kavala took the time to do a quick clean up from making the lard and tallow, and got out the supplies she needed to make the soap. She was going to scent it with the same essential oil of sage she’d already created, so the distiller went back on the shelf as well. She also had leftover beeswax that was needed as well, so that got left out, though in a pot on the oven to be melted. She got out two pots, a large wooden spoon, and large wide-mouthed jars. She checked the recipe from her philtering book and came up with a list of ingredients.

Kavala needed lye flakes, olive oil soap shavings, water, and gum turpintine. She had all three on hand, the soap being leftovers from when The Sanctuary made soap for itself and trimmed it down to bars and balls to be used in the bath chamber. The recipe called for 6 ¼ parts beeswax, ten parts lye, and ten parts water. The lye could have been made, but Kavala often bought it raw because it was so caustic and ate clothing, skin, and even the containers it was in if it wasn’t kept in glass. She use d the beeswax in the pot as a starter and added 10 parts lye and 10 parts water. Kavala set the mixture to boil, stirring it rapidly as it did so.

She took the second pot, melted two parts soap shavings with ten parts water. Then she stirred with another spoon. She waited until the soap liquefied, then added that mixture to the beeswax mixture and and stirred it evenly until it was firmly combined. She removed the pot from the heat totally and added in the 15 parts of turpentine. She stirred it fiercely and poured it into the jars. She capped the jars and set them aside.

Then she grabbed a flannel cloth and soaked it in warm water and then wrung them out until almost dry. She dipped it into freshly made soap and rubbed the cloth until it lathered up. She tested it on a piece of leather in her lab, rubbing it a circular motion for a moment. The leather came clean, and Kavala smiled. Nice!

Kavala then set everything aside she made, and began cleaning up the mess. Pots were scrubbed, spoons were cleaned, and everything was put back on the shelf where it was supposed to go.

by **Taylani** on November 12th, 2013, 3:21 pm

Kavala

Skills :

Lores :

Notes :

Solo [The Sanctuary] For The Love Of Leather