A short description of how to make your traditional own shoe polish, to water proof leather and also to soften it.

Ingredients:

• Animal fat (enough to fill a pot)
• Bee’s wax (about what fits in one hand)
• Cooking Oil (about half as much as the wax)
• Tar (a few table spoons)

Proportions depend on preferences for color and consistency.

• We fill a pot with lard, or more specifically: fat from intestines, as this is thicker giving a more firm consistency of the finished product. This is a left-over product from butcheries and can be bought at the same time as buying e.g. sheep skin for my tannery-project.

• We boil out the fat for about one hour, in a pot with some water. Smells like bacon to some, smells like grim death to others. We boil off the water, leaving only fat, and the now shriveled up tissue.

• We separate out the fat, and do a “tea spoon test”, in that we let it cool, to test its consistency at room temperature

• We add a few table spoons of tar (swe: tjära) from birch (swe: björknäver), but pine tree tar works well. (However, some tar are better for tape archives). This is done to act as a conservation agent for the fat, and in addition it darkens the color and water proofs the leather.
• We add bees wax for making it firmer, and improved water proofing the leather when applying the finished result to it.
• We add food grade oil (e.g. olive) to make it softer, to be able to apply it easier.
• Pour it into suitable sized containers, and let it cool

The tar is made by filling a metal jar with birch bark, and make a hole in the bottom, while heating the jar up, by burning wood around it, for roughly half an hour up to several hours. Place a glass jar underneath to collect the tar.

Typically we can dig a hole and bury the glass jar underneath the ground, and put the metal jar and fire on top.

The left over fat-tissue was called “Grevar” in Swedish (eng: Counts), and were typically given to the poorest family that did not have any animals to slaughter, so that they could make another batch from the village’s left over.