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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;smallaxe, post: 10144027, member: 13430&quot;]Is the leather soft, stiff, or hard?</p><p>It&#039;s hard to tell without a closup photo, but it looks like the leather was tanned with the epidermis layer left on. It is much harder to end up with a soft, pliable leather when brain tanning a skin with the epidermis left on. You can doing chemical tan though. Initially after brain tanning, leather is white. If such leather ever gets wet, it will lose much of its softness and dry back to being something between leather and rawhide (unless it&#039;s stretched and worked while it dries). I don&#039;t know the chemical reason for it, but if you smoke the leather after it&#039;s first tanned, it handles water much better, and will mostly dry soft after getting wet. As you&#039;d imagine smoked brain tan leather is brown.</p><p>Where I&#039;m headed, is if the epidermis is left on, the leather starts out being less pliable. If it gets wet, it may become very stiff, especially the epidermis layer itself.</p><p>I&#039;m not sure about the lines. They could be scars the animal had, but there&#039;s a lot, and multiple scars are often parallel and on the back. Or, it could be from uneven shrinking after getting wet. Another possibility is little cut marks from dehairing the hide if they scraped the hair off rather than letting it slip/rot off. I&#039;m speculating though, and don&#039;t really know.</p><p>A closeup would help, but it kind of doesn&#039;t look like deer skin to me. I&#039;ve never worked with moose hide, so I don&#039;t know if it&#039;s that, but I bet it&#039;s something bigger than a deer.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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