The first step to start making parchment is to slaughter the chosen animal or animals. The number of sheep or cow hides needed depends greatly on the number and size of sheets of parchment one needs to produce. Next, the skins of the animal s would then be soaked in a lime solution to help get rid of hair and fat on the skin. To help with hair removal, a curved blade was used in a processes called scudding. Parchment makers wanted to remove all the hair possible in this step. Finally, the skins would be washed in water to remove the lime solution and hung to dry on stretcher. A stretcher was used because the skin wanted to shrink up as it dried, but that wouldn’t produce very good parchment. “The structure of the skin began to change [on the stretcher], the fiber network reorganized itself into a thing, highly stressed laminal structure” (Graham and Clemens 10-11). As the skin dried, the parchment maker would have to tighten the frame holding the skin so it was well stretched.