A Modern Account of Making Parchment (on a Budget)

For a school-related project, I have been working on making vellum. Point of clarification: parchment is a generic term for prepared writing surfaces made from animal skin; vellum is parchment made from calf skins, specifically.

This is not a project for the faint of heart! In my research, I have unearthed very few current accounts of the process, and none that really outlined the amount of work that goes into it.

There are a number of steps that I had not really thought about before beginning this project. For instance, I had not really thought about having to THOROUGHLY rinse the skins before doing anything else. When I say "thoroughly rinse," I mean letting them soak in baths of cold water for only an hour at a time, and changing that water out every hour--even in the middle of the night--for two days.

After this, we put the hides into a slaked lime solution to help us de-hair them. (Just so you know, you are supposed to get all of the extra flesh off before putting the hides in the slaked lime. We know that now, for what it is worth.)

We basically left them alone at that point, only going out to stir them once a day for about a week. We should have stirred them more often, but it is really hard to juggle school and a school project . . . funny that teachers, with all of their education, have not figured that one out yet. (Either that, or they are just sadistic.)

The really fun part about all of this was, we had to dress up every time we wanted to stir them. We wore rubber gloves and goggles, because we decided we really did not want a first hand experience of how slaked lime works.

Once the hair began to slip out easily when we pulled on it with our slippery gloves, we hauled the hides out of the lime and started scraping them. Because we were on a budget, we pulled the hides over some thirty gallon trash cans, and we used knives with duct tape wrapped around the tip of the blade so that we could use it like a two-handled knife. We still got to wear gloves at this stage, because the lime is still active in the hides for a while. It is hard to get it all out, and requires another thorough rinsing, which you only want to do after you are finished scraping it.

Actually, this is very useful, because we ignorant students dumped our slaked lime out as soon as we started scraping. Hides are not easy to de-hair, especially with sharp clunky knives and giant rubber gloves. I've heard that dull blades work better, because they actually scrape instead of slice. With our equipment, the hair stayed on in clumps. There were several times where we had to soak them for a while and try again later.

Being the brilliant parchment makers we are, we tried to dissolve the unwanted portions of the other side of the hide in slaked lime, too. We discovered the reason you remove all you can before the lime bath: if you leave it on, it stains the hide.

Even after the lime bath, though, we still had to scrape everything. The flesh side is really hard to scrape while wearing rubber gloves. For this side, though, it is kind of nice to have a sharp knife, as long as you remember to keep the blade angled away from the hide itself. The part of the skin that you want to preserve is slightly tougher than the rest of it, but it is still very easy to accidentally slice through it.

The main lesson we have learned so far is that scraping hides takes a very long time. We have four hides. There were two of us scraping for almost four hours each, and I put in an additional four or five hours by myself. We have gotten the flesh side semi-presentable on two hides, and we have started de-hairing both of these hides. We probably do not have either hide even half done at this point, though.

With our combined times, we have spent nearly thirteen hours scraping hides, and I do not think that we even have the equivalent of one hide scraped yet. It is definitely time intensive. It is also back-breaking work, and the smell and sight does remain at the back of your mind for days.

That is as far as we have gotten on our project so far. I will probably write more when (and if) we manage to make some more progress.

I think I am starting to realize why there were so few books during the middle ages. Apparently, it took 170 calf skins to make the Gutenberg Bible. Even if some other manuscripts were smaller projects, the amount of work put into even one skin would certainly delay the process. I also think you would only want to record the REALLY important things on vellum.