Fish skin

What was your first thought when you read the title? “She´s blogging about what she had for dinner!?!”

Nope, that´s not it. I got yet another exciting package in the mail, this time from Denmark. With a very exotic content! Leather from a snake, a “steinbit” ( is that a catfish?), a salmon and a little frog.

Fun as this might seem, it is actually for a commission piece I´m about to start working on. I´ll tell you more about this later. Let me just start by saying that fish-skin is very strong, just as strong as any other type of leather. During WW2, shoes were made with fish-skin, amongst other things.

The salmon-leather is very dry, and even though it has been dyed, it has a very pastel tint. Pastels aren´t usually my cup of tea.

So experiment #1 is to see how I can give it more color, and still keep the softness. Instead of using chemicals, I simply sponged on some fabric paint.

The color seems to add nicely a vibrance to the leather without making it stiff. So moving on to:

Experiment # 2 is to see how I can give it shine without losing the soft stretch of the leather. This might require more trial-and-error, but we´ll see if we can´t find a good solution for it. If anyone already has experimented with this and has some great tips, please let me know.

The other pieces of leather will be used in other projects. When I get the time.