Making Veg Tanned Fish Skin Leather

A while ago a did a fish skin leather blog https://austinlill.blogspot.com/2018/... basically to chart my progress in this adventure.

I'm certainly not setting myself up as an expert in fish skin leather but when I started this particular journey I didn't find a plethera of information out there, so I thought I'd do a video covering my latest 'production'-With tips on what I've found went well, and indeed not so well and have added it to the afore mentioned blog.

I mention in the video that I'd post the amount of tannin mix that I generated, it was around 8 litres of decent coloured 'soup' from 0.9 kilo of chopped bark plus the collected old teabags in the video.

I allude to the fact that the skins are a little sticky once prepped and I would suggest several washes under a tap, running between finger and thumb to remove gloop and scales. Also fish juice doesn't seem to do lawn much good!

I do find that the stretching process does remove a little of the colour from the underside, I'm assuming that this is unavoidable but equally if you pile too much dark tannin mix in too soon it 'case hardens' the skin meaning that the tannins won't penetrate past the inital outer colour.

Finally, with the windy conditions at the time of smoking I had the light bulb moment of supplementing the smouldering punk wood smoke with my ProQ metal smoke generator. If you fancy seeing a bit more information about the ProQ this is a previous camping Youtube video featuring it here:
   • Oatcakes, Smoked Cheese and Butter ma...   and a blog here:
https://austinlill.blogspot.com/2019/...

Hope this is of some use and of course if you are a seasoned fish skin botherer and you see something worthy of commenting on please feel free.