07-31-2014, 03:29 PM | #1 |
Join Date: Jul 2012
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Making fur or leather clothes
Intrepid but naked heroes trapped in remote wilderness. Given the skills, how easy would it be to improvise some clothing from, say, wolf pelts. They have only a knife to help them, and what tools and materials might be improvised from the Scandinavian landscape.
Is it possible at all, or do you need particular chemicals to make fur clothes? Many thanks if you can help! |
07-31-2014, 04:11 PM | #2 |
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Maitland, NSW, Australia
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Re: Making fur or leather clothes
I'd love to see various options for calculating how much useful hide you'd get from a particular animal based on body shape and mass. And how much is needed to make a set of clothing. Regarding tanning, if you have no resources then brain tanning is the only real option.
http://www.braintan.com/
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07-31-2014, 04:49 PM | #3 | |
Join Date: Nov 2004
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Re: Making fur or leather clothes
Quote:
For immediate use, you won't be able to tan it at all, and will have to settle for just scraping it; this is entirely possible, however. It will also be pretty crude because you won't have had time to process sinew into thread or bones into needles. It will not last for more than a month or so in wearable condition, and will start to be pretty unpleasant to wear sooner than that, but it beats freezing and will keep you going long enough to tan some other hides properly, a process which takes a few days, possibly up to a week depending on local climate (in Northwest Canada about 5 days, per my caribou-hunting cousin). Survival skill will help with tanning and making the tools mentioned, but Sewing is called for to make something wearable once you have them. A good-sized wolf pelt is about enough for a smallish blanket or cape, or a robe for a SM-1 or smaller character, or a vest or possibly trousers for an SM 0 character. 3-3 1/2 wolfhides will be enough to kit an SM 0 character with pants, a top, foot coverings, hand coverings and a hat. Deer have slightly larger usable hides but aren't as warm. Reindeer are a good choice, they're bigger than wolves but have a good pelt on them. Avoid bears, you're not nearly well enough armed to try to get their pelts away from them. |
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07-31-2014, 06:09 PM | #4 |
Join Date: Feb 2014
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Re: Making fur or leather clothes
You could also smoke them to clean them up a little and help preserve them. Sewing them together would be more problematic, but you could use birch strips or wolf gut for that.
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08-01-2014, 03:35 AM | #5 | |
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Charlotte, North Caroline, United States of America, Earth?
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Re: Making fur or leather clothes
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A furnace can be readily made from rocks, but you need to seal the gaps with something. Where I live, it was customary for moonshiners to build their furnaces out of fieldstone and use the red clay that is widespread here to seal them up. But I don't know if Sweden has that sort of clay.
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