We have been back from the UK for about a month now. Our trip was everything we had hoped it would be. Our only regrets are that we didn’t make the trip sooner and that we weren’t able to stay longer. While we saw lots of sheep as we traveled from tannery to tannery, we didn’t allow ourselves enough time to fully embrace the fact that sheep are a huge part of the culture over there. The shops we saw in Wales were full of wool products; sheepskin, items made of woven wool fabric and loads of knitted goods. Much like our local Fibershed movements, there is a culture of traceability in the wool industry in Wales. Unfortunately, we didn’t get a chance to explore much of England, though we did spend an afternoon at the Stone site in Avebury which was magical, but it wasn’t very sheepy.

Lack of sightseeing aside, we accomplished all we set out to do for the Tannery. We met some truly amazing tanners. A little background on the process we witnessed: Organic Sheepskins was originally founded by a woman named Nicky Port. Nicky started out tanning goatskins with a chemical process that she eventually had an allergic reaction to. She then spent 10- 15 years creating a much safer, bark tanning operation. An operation that she shared with the founders of Welsh Organic Tannery, and a couple of Americal tanners as well, the founder of Vermont Natural Tannery (now under new ownership) and Living Sky Tannery in Idaho among others. It was in our original business plan to get training from Nicky as well, but the Covid 19 pandemic hit, and we were unable to travel. After 5 years of operating in our own way, we visited Organic Sheepskins which is now owned by Mark Raymond and Welsh Organic Tannery owned by Steve and Emma Allum.

It was lovely to see how efficiently their operations are run. Although we do the same process, with almost identical results, our operation looks much different. We came back to the states with a head full of ideas with which we can make improvements to our process without changing the results. There were things we saw that we didn’t think possible. For instance, we wash all our sheepskin by hand because the big tanning operations in our country wash sheepskin in large machines. Felting occurs in those machines which isn’t an issue for the large operators because they comb, iron and treat their sheepskin with silicone in order to create a uniform fluffy white end product. That is not the product we aim to produce. We champion the unique fiber structure in all the various breeds we work with. We truly believed that a machine would destroy the integrity of the wool. Thanks to our friends in the UK, we learned that washing can be done in small batches in machines that are programmed correctly. Using machines will help us reduce our water usage. As with anything we do that is new, we will be running test batches with hides we source locally before we do anything new to our customer hides.

Paddle vats are another tool which we will be adding to our process. Currently we tan in static tanks which are manually stirred several times a day. We have one paddle vat in our operation which was made for us from a dairy bulk tank and we have been passively looking for more options for years. We just hadn’t made it a priority until now.

Those are the main investments in the process you will see us make in the next year.

Stay tuned to learn more about our visit with Cotmarsh Tannery, a non-profit tannery opening soon in Wiltshire, England. They inspired a new vision for our workshop that we are excited to share you.

Thank you for reading and for following along on our journey in the natural tanning space.

Until next time…