When making garments (gloves, blankets, coat, etc), do you use the sewn leg hole sections? Or block it and cut up to the legs?

You will get better use out of your pelts with the leg holes cut out and blocked square-less wasteage when making a blanket or other article that uses several pelts.
For a hat or mitts that uses only one pelt,it doesnt really make much of a difference.
When selling tanned pelts to people who work with fur my customers prefer them blocked oval.
You can cut out the legholes on an oval blocked pelt and re block it square if you wish.

Our big tanneries split leg holes on all beaver skins unless you specify otherwise. This automatically means no seams from legholes and usually hexagonal blocking, especially with sheared/plucked pelts. They showed me the equipment they use and this eases up the stretching/drying part of the tanning process. This is also how all furriers (including big factories that make fur coats) want them.

Hi Tatiana.
I have a question.
Is the palas cat used in your country for its fur?

Nope. They are too redlisted for that and the fur's not much to look at to be worth the potential trouble. All those steppe animals are kind of plain and bleak, like corsac foxes. I think manul fur would be similar to spotless lynx backs, not something people would recognize in the street.


There's an eccentric fur dealer/furrier in Irkutsk who sells all kinds of unusual furs, including those that would put a regular person in prison for a long time, with our tiger-loving president (I have no idea why they're still in business), but even he doesn't have manul fur



http://smenshikov.ru/catalog/item/11/

Thanks Tatiana.

Would you please explain (again) to a newbie what "blocking" is?

Blocking is the process of taking the excess stretch out of a tanned skin in preparation for marking the pattern,cutting and sewing.It is also done to shape different parts of a fur coat in preparation for construction.
You wet the leather with a sponge or spray bottle.fold it leather to leather,roll it up for an hour or so,then unroll give it another bit of water then stretch it out even either with a stapler or with pins.
Then let dry for 24 hours.
All repairs are done to the skin before blocking.
It is called blockin because furriers use a table with intersecting lines marked that looks like square blocks,This allows you to stretch the skin evenly.

I just use a marked beaver board,
When a furrier makes a fur coat the skins are blocked a bunch of times during the process of constructing the parts of the coat.
When furriers re style old fur coats or when working with older tanned skins they use alcohol to wet the skins for blocking.

Cool, thank you!

So, with regard to that, would there be any advantage to putting a cased critter on a stretching board for this purpose?

Blocking a cased critter on a stretcher and letting it dry will stretch it back close to pre-tanned size and will give it nice clean shape. I block most of my case skinned items after tanning to remove the wrinkles and give them a nice shape. Makes a difference if you are using them as wall hangers.

Yes you can do that,like QBD said.
Also very good practice after you repair all defects on a tanned display pelt to block out cased on a clean forming board.
Gets back the original size and takes out the puckers from repairs and excess stretch.

Thanks a bunch guys!

When I made a beaver blanket I made a hexagonal pattern. I sewed the leg holes and laid the pattern over the pelts and minimized loss. When I make gloves, for the outer shell ,I use back fur mostly, so leg holes are not in the pattern. When I make belly fur liners I sew up the holes and make the pieces that eventually are sewed together. Liners are more of a Frankenstein project, they don't have to look pretty. Strength is important, so I don't block all the stretch out of pelt. Many times I will block to the patterns I'm using. I don't just block them all the same.

P.S. These are pelts with leg holes not opened at tannery.