If you have neighbors in your culture they will say there’s more than one way to skin the crow or the aardvark or whatever creature they’re likely to contemplate the skinning of and they will say this because they are related to people who said it and there’s no mystery to this. If your great great great uncle Tom Foolery said there’s more than one way to make pantaloons from clouds then your family would be saying this and chances are good that a whole nation of restless wanderers might be saying it. A phrase doesn’t have to make sense. It doesn’t have to have meaning insofar as the direct object is concerned. Obviously the skinning of crows is not a profitable industry and it scarcely leads to good eating. You skin a crow because there’s more than one way to do it. There’s more than one way to make pants from a rain cloud. (Best though if you have the rainy part on the outside, the fluffy stuff on the inside, etc.)
The reason some catchy aphorisms and divigations catch on is that they’re attached to living roughly. Skinning a crow is not to be undertaken perhaps but there are useless crows all around the maddening fields and therefore they make themselves available to the poetry of tough living and compensatory nonsense.
Local culture migrates when the aphoristic qualities of its poverty are useful in other towns.
Otherwise a phrase stays behind like the armoire they couldn’t fit in the conestoga wagon.
This is why the rich have no poetry.
SK
Planet of the Blind 
I understand that’s why the gateway to the west has so many armoires. Why isn’t that an idiom? “He dumped me like an armoire.”
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