Raw Hide Drums

Brigham Young University in Provo, often hosts free events and activities open to anyone and everyone! Sometimes these activities and events can be weekly, but most commonly, they are monthly. As part of the dance program at BYU, they hosted a drum making activity! The cost was $25 per person, but you got to create an actual drum from real raw hide!

This activity took around two hours on a Saturday afternoon. Everyone met at the Richards Building, or the activity building on campus and we all sat down to watch the demonstration and see what the end product would look like. The lady in charge hunts wildlife and skins animals in order to teach students how to create things like drums and other products from raw animal hide.

The first step to creating your drum is cutting your raw hide to size. Many times, raw hide is stretchy and expands a lot after sitting in cold water for awhile. We cut the hides down to size to fit just barely around the circular ring that makes up the base of the drum. Then we dried the hides out as much as possible with towels.

After the hides were as dry as we could make them, we went outside to die the hides. Die is really difficult to get out of anything, and it stains concrete so we had to be extra careful not to damage property. There was dry die and liquid die. I spread various amounts of both dies on my hide to try to make a swirl design. Then, you soak your die in a giant cooler of water and squeeze out the last droplets of liquid.

Next, we dried up with towel the last parts of the water and brought the hides to the table. At this point, they smell really bad! We also grabbed the circular rings and drew outlines of where to criss cross the next part of the drum. We also grabbed thin strands of hide that would be our weave through part of the drum. We aligned the hide on the bottom of the circular ring and pulled the hide really hard to cover all parts of the circle. The hide is still stretchy at this point, so its important to pull it as tight as you can for a tight drum.

The last portion is to poke 8 holes all around the circular outmost part of the hide and weave through the second thing piece of hide. This part is really hard because both pieces of hide are still stretchy and moist which makes it difficult to pull the hide tight. After you go around the entire circle and pull as tight as you can, you tie four gigantic knots to hold the hide in place. The final and optional step, is to add a soft velvet handle in which you can wrap around your drum to make it easier to hold. Then the drum dries for at least ten hours. This activity is super fun and I would recommend it to anyone. Even little kids have fun creating drums!