Hide Tanning Classes

Groundwork offers hide tanning classes for all skill levels! Join us to tan your first hide or master more advanced tanning techniques!

Dates: Hide tanning classes are offered throughout the year. Check the Folk School class schedule.
Class size: Classes are 4-6 people.
Ages: 16+.
Tuition: Sliding scale: dependent on duration, includes all materials.

Jump to Class Schedule

Class Offerings

Sheepskin Tanning

Level: Beginner (No experience needed)
Class Length: 3 days (9am to 4pm with a 1-hour lunch break)

Come join us at the Groundwork Educational Farm for 3 days of immersion into the art and craft of hide tanning! Over the course of a long weekend, we will take raw sheep hides and transform them into soft, supple and durable sheepskin rugs. The class will cover all steps involved with hair-on smoke tanning, with other lectures and demonstrations on topics including tanning hair-off hides(buckskin), bark tanning, and leather sewing/clothing making.
You will be able to leave this course with the basic, fundamental understanding of how to transform hides right off the animal into usable textile for clothing, bedding or decor.
This course also offers the opportunity to connect with like-minded individuals, camp for 3 nights along the bank of the North Fork Gunnison River, and eat from the land!

Skills: scraping hides, tanning hides, smoking hides

spicy chilis at the Paonia farmers marketWorking on naturally tanned sheepskinsGroup posing with sheepskins they tannedNaturally tanned sheepskinsfood systems fellows with their sheepskins

Hide Tanning Class Schedule

Dates Location Teacher(s) Class Register
May 23 – 25, 2025 Paonia, Colorado Forrest Gilles Sheepskin Tanning Weekend Immersion Register

 

 

spicy chilis at the Paonia farmers marketFinished elk hock bagElk hock bags in processWorking on naturally tanned sheepskinsGroup posing with sheepskins they tannedNaturally tanned sheepskinsfood systems fellows with their sheepskinsnaturally tanned sheepskin

Meet The Teachers


Forrest Gillies, Groundwork Farm Manager

Forrest Gillies

Forrest was fortunate to be raised at one of the oldest intentional communities, nestled into the red sandstone foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Being surrounded by wilderness, sustainable agriculture and abundant community shaped him into a human inspired to share these gifts with a world starving for land based connection. Guided by the question of how to create and sustain real, viable culture, Forrest found answers in the seeds. After studying Ecological Agriculture: Seeds, Bees & Soil at the Evergreen State College, he discovered the ways in which seed, subsistence agricultural systems and traditional life-ways create the foundational framework for real culture to emerge. Forrest has managed multiple regenerative farm and education projects including Siskiyou Seeds and White Oak Farm, offers nature connection programs for youth and is apprenticing in natural building. Rooted in reverence for the human & more-than-human world, Forrest walks in service to a more beautiful world we all know is possible. Forrest is a certified Wilderness First Responder.


Kelly Moody

Kelly Moody

Kelly grew up in rural southern Virginia in tobacco country, working at her family’s nursery business. She earned a B.A. in Philosophy and Religious Studies, Anthropology at Christopher Newport University in Virginia in 2009, focusing on globalization of culture and land relationships, environmental ethics and ‘east-west’ comparative philosophies. After that she worked on and ran organic farms, studied with various herbalists, gardeners, permaculturists and ecologists from Vermont to Ohio, North Carolina, California, New Mexico and beyond. She has also spent countless hours in self-study working with plants on public land across the U.S. west. She is the main facilitator behind the Ground Shots Project and Podcast, a work that explores cross-ecological and societal intersections. Kelly is a certified Wilderness First Responder.