for a five-member family to each have two sets of everyday clothing, and another 225 hours to cut and sew the garments from them. There is no clear estimate for the comparable number of seal hides required to fully clothe a five-member family, although it required approximately eight seal skins to create two parkas and two pairs of pants for one man, and six skins to create boots and mitts for a family of that size. Tools Inuit seamstresses traditionally used tools handcrafted from animal materials like bone, baleen, antler and ivory, including the (, plural: uluit, 'woman's knife'), knife sharpener, blunt and sharp scrapers, needle, awl, thimble and thimble-guard, and a needlecase. were particularly important tools for seamstresses. Considered to be integral to their identity, they were often buried with their owner. As well as animal materials, wood and stone were also often used to make . When available, meteoric iron or copper was cold worked into blades by a process of hammering, folding, and filing. After contact with non-Inuit explorers and traders, Inuit began to make use of sheet tin, brass, non-meteoric iron, and steel, obtained by trading or scrapping. They also adopted steel sewing needles, which were more durable than bone needles. European contact also brought scissors to the Inuit, but they were not widely adopted, as they do not cut furry hides as cleanly as sharp knives. Today, many tools are mail-ordered or handmade to suit from available materials. During fieldwork conducted on Baffin Island in the 1980s, anthropologist Jill Oakes described being made from saw blades, with handles made from materials as varied as "plastic bread board, an old gun stock or scrap lumber," shaped to fit the user's hand. Hide processing The first stage was the harvesting of the skin from the animal carcass after a successful hunt. Generally, the hunter would cut the skin in such a way that it could be removed in one piece. Skinning and butchering an adult caribou could take an experienced hunter up to an hour. While butchering of caribou was handled by men, butchering of seals was mostly handled by women. After the skin was removed, the hides would be dried on wooden frames, then laid on the knees or on a scraping platform and scraped of fat and other tissues with an until soft and pliable. Most skins, including bird skins, were processed in roughly the