(Photo: a lamb hide drying on a herse.)
My default for making parchment is lamb. It is what I can obtain most readily. The ever-lovely and encouraging Mistress Abigail procured me about half a dozen calf hides last year, and I'm currently working on the second and third ones. (The first is finished but needs a resoak and restretch due to getting creased by being sat on by a cat or 3 before I could cut it.)
Not to be too punny, but calf is an entirely different animal.
After being scudded, soaked in lime, dehaired, and limed again if needed, lamb hides tend to be very floppy. You pick them up from a central point and they hang straight down. Calf hides have more structural integrity, in a way. You pick them up from a central point and they have more volume. Like a taffeta versus a charmeuse.
Lamb hides generally have very distinct visible differences between the grain and the dermis. This distinction is not as easily observed in calf.
At this point it seems to me that water is more easily pushed out of calf hides by scraping; using a draw knife dries them out much more quickly than it does lamb. This may just be the several I've done so far.
Lamb grain (the epidermis of the skin, the layer that holds the hair follicles) comes of in stretchy bits or straps usually. Once you get an edge lifted, you can generally pull it with your fingers and detach a piece. Direction of force is along the length of the flensing beam.
Calf is not at all like that. Gail described it to me once as coming off like curls of cold butter, and that is being kind. In my experience so far, calf grain comes off only on the small area directly touched by the blade of the drawknife. I also found myself needing to use a lot more energy pushing down into the hide and flensing beam than with lamb. The result is degraining a calf hide requires a lot more time and effort than on lamb.
After degraining, the calf hide, again, has more body than the lamb. So I would guess it is based on having longer or thicker or denser collagen fibers in the dermis, as the difference does not go away with the grain.
Doing the second scudding, or scraping the flesh side of the hide again, was also different. The membranes seem more firmly attached, and more difficult to remove cleaning from the flesh side of the dermis on the calf. Again, cold butter.
I want to take a series of photos to compare, but I need another pair of hands for that.
Here concludeth the lesson, part 1.
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