Gut Sewing Class

There was an unquantifiable goal in mind when I decided to come back to Bethel: Take advantage of everything! A few years ago A and I tried the age old suggestion of, "Say yes to everything," but that becomes exhausting. "Say yes to more," would be an easier maxiam to follow, but still a little harder to track. One item on my birthday list was "One community event a month," so I will check this as complete.

At the beginning of the month I saw an ad on Facebook that the Smithsonian was hosting an event in Bethel focusing on seal gut sewing. As excruciating as it is to give up the entire weekend, this seemed like a worthy reason.

This is Mary, our teacher. She has spent a lot of time in Anchorage recently working with the Anchorage Museum and Smithsonian collection as a resident artist. She had prepared all the seal gut that the native students in this class used. It is a pain staking-ly long process, including several days of soaking, cleaning, and scraping. For the rest of us, we are using hog casing or collagen. She is an excellent teacher and a wealth of information.

 

This are the hog casings we were blowing up and drying. It was a lot like making ballon animals, as long as you were ok with a snake or eel.

We tied them off and stung them out tight to dry. We will  learn how to cut them tomorrow.

 Then we got to the sewing. This is my two pieces of collagen sewn together. The sheets are folded over and sewn together with a piece of dried grass on either side. The grass acts as a backbone for the thread to wrap around so the thread won't pull through when you tighten each stitch. You keep the grass moistened as you go so that when you tighten the thread, it squeezes the grass to create as waterproof of a seal as you can. This is going to be a window hanging, so waterproofness isn't so important now, but if you were counting on a parka while on a kayak on the open ocean, it would be a  higher priority.

I'll go back tomorrow to add another strip, and maybe experiment with decorating the gut with pigments.