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I just stocked my freezer with some home-made sausages. There are some photos here. This one is of sausage but please be cautious if you look at other photos in the set as they depict the butchery of an entire deer.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/art_chel/2181035092/in/set-72157603661691795/

Casings may be found online or through a commercial sausage company near you. You will of course have to buy a relatively large volume of casings usually but they last a really long time.

Learning how to make sausage is an easy and rewarding craft. It is a method of food preparation and preservation that was developed to use parts of the animal that would be difficult to prepare and eat any other way. I believe sausage making will continue to be a rediscovered craft as people are waking up to the sad state of factory farming and small butcher shops are opening to fill a niche.

I've already started grinding my own meat whenever I need ground beef/pork/etc., and I'd really like to try sausage-making. We're lucky enough to have a great farmers' market with lots of little independent butchers and sausage-makers, but homemade is probably even better.

I never bother putting my homemade sausage in a casing.

Casing = sausage condom

I got it the first time quercus.

Some people have to use sausage casing (lambskin) because they are allergic to latex.

Ew, don't use collagen casings. The natural kind are much better and actually taste good. You can often buy them in small quantities from a good butcher, or even from gourmet supermarkets where they make their own sausage. Failing that, Art's advice is spot on: Google "sausage making supplies" and you will find dozens of retailers ready to sell you casings.

We hosted a sausage-making party last summer: Everyone brought a pork shoulder and a KitchenAid mixer, and we all went home with 5 pounds of different sausages for our freezers. We'll definitely be doing that again!

Sausage-fest photos and details here:
http://marriedwithdinner.com/2007/07/25/dont-fear-the-wurst/

I just happened to make my own sausages at home this past week; they're something my grandmother used to make on a regular basis on a hand-crank meat grinder. I have a kitchenaid stand mixer and the grinder/sausage tube attachments. I usually get my casings by asking around at butchers; this last batch was courtesy of Whole foods. Enough for about 10 pounds cost me a whopping $.92. I've always found it to be a much easier process (especially the first couple of times around) to have two people do it together--one to load the sausage meat, the other to regulate the distribution of the meat into the casing. Once you get the hang of it, it just isn't that hard, and certainly worth the reward. Our family recipe, in good italian-american tradition, involves lots of garlic, fennel seed, and pepper.

But I didn't mean "it" the first time.

I never bother with sausage casings. When I buy sausage from the store, I always cut the casing and crumble the meat into a skillet. Sausage is more of a seasoning than a main dish for me, so 1 link is plenty to season 4 or 5 servings of something.

Patties can be cooked on the grill, too.

Definitely the more the merrier when it comes to making sausage. The more hands the better.

I would also add that keeping equipment and ingredients ICE cold is an essential rule in sausage making. When ingredients are cold and firm the ingredients will be cut rather than smeared through the die resulting in a cleaner flavor and better texture.

I was just having fun quercus. I usually don't case my sausage either. Just now and then. I like to make fresh chorizo every so often and as everyone knows, it's best crumbled into eggs or stuffed into chicken or crumbled in tortilla soup. Some people are intimidated by casing the sausage and if they knew how easy it was to make patties more people may be willing to give it a go. Of course, if you wanted to do something kind of in-between, you could get your hands on some caul fat and make crepinettes.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/art_chel/2181034400/