Roman \"Canteen\"

[M. Demetrius]

A good while back, I semi-successfully tanned a few deerskins. It was messy and distasteful beyond my imagination. In the end, I had little better than rawhide, which, of course has it uses, but not so great for a shirt. Anyway, scraping dessicated fat and decaying muscle from the skin, removing the hair, figuring out what to do with the various nasty bits afterwards, and getting the smell of all that off my hands made it clear to me that was somebody, anybody, else's job. It's no wonder that the tanneries were located on the fringe of or outside of towns.

Having said that, there are chemical kits you can buy that make the first part of the process a little easier. For example:
http://www.tandyleatherfactory.com/en-us...tions.aspx

But it's still hours of hard work, and that's all there is to it.