Interesting Fish Skin Dye And Treatment

[Tiara]

I bought some stretched but unfinished fish crust skins from sealeather.com

They are pretty pliable to start with, a pale gray and sort of a suede texture.

The green and blue asymmetrical cuff and buckle were dyed green first and then partially dyed with blue, using a rather dry sponge and hitting the edges of the scale pockets and a bit of the center. Dried overnight.

I don't know how well you can see the difference in the texture of the cuff and buckle. The cuff had a bit of a wrinkle in it I was hoping to smooth out. While everything I have read about the times you might need to iron leather using low heat I tried something a bit different. The cuff was not as soft as I wanted it to feel so I brushed on a light coat of glycerin, water and alcohol. about 80% alcohol, 15% water and 5% glycerin. let it equalize for about an hour and then while still damp, covered it with paper and ironed it at medium low heat. The wrinkled area wasn't changing much so I tried adding some water to the iron and hit it with a few blasts of steam. This raised the scale pockets up about an 1/8th of an inch giving it some interesting texture so I did the whole cuff and let dry over night.

I was curious if acrylic paint base would sort of glue down the scale pockets or affect the cuff's now raised pockets. I mixed Angelus leather paint neutral with some blue green color shift pigment and diluted it a bit. I took the skin meant for the buckle which hadn't been ironed/steam treated or used glycerin on. The acrylic paint did smooth down the edges and seems to be holding down well. Glued the skin to the veg tan and stitched.

The paint on the cuff didn't weigh down the raised pockets and the texture brings out the color shift more. The only bright sunlight I've had recently to take pix in has been at noon so it flattens out the shadows. I'll try to get some better pix as lighting permits.

The black piece I didn't use glycerin on but did steam treat to raise the pockets a bit. I sprayed it with a high gloss acrylic finish as the satin finish seemed too dull on this when I tested a corner. The high gloss on the rough textured leather didn't come across as looking like plastic and gave more contrast and depth to the scale pockets. This became a belt buckle for my sweetheart. He didn't want something too flashy but with enough pattern to be interesting. I'll get a pic of the finished buckle to post.

I had bought some samples of various finishes of fish leather several months ago. The satin and gloss finishes are quite firm and on some of them the scale pattern didn't show very well with the dye and finish. I didn't use suede dye, just the Angelus and Fiebings I had on hand. If I ever want to keep a suede feel to the fish leather, I'll get some suede dye. So far for these 3 items the dye didn't stiffen it so much it was hard to stitch, I like the finishes and the steam treatment with or without the glycerin lets me vary the texture.