On Making Fish Skin Parchment

Yes, you read that title correctly--I made fish skin parchment.

In April, Peter D. Verheyen provided a webinar on how to go about making parchment from fish skin, which I finally got around to watching last month.

My initial response to watching it was that while it was certainly interesting, I didn't know that I'd actually ever want to try it. But then the more I read about its history and the process of making it and fish skin leather, the more intrigued I became and ultimately decided that I really did want to try!

Having finally had salmon for dinner, I gained three small skins and, following the video and Verheyen's ""Fips" and His Eels: Fish Skin in Bookbinding", began the process. I started out by placing my three small skins in dish detergent filled jar in the refrigerator to rinse. Having no unscented detergent in the house that wasn't also dyed, I ended up having to use undyed, lemon scent, which I don't think had too big of an impact (though this being my first attempt I might not have noticed if something was amiss).

The next day I took them out for their first scraping, which I did with the back of a butter knife and the side of a spoon. A considerable amount of meat came off, as you can see!  

Over the next few days I repeated this process to get any remaining meat off and with changes of the sudsy water in between.

Not sure how it would go and with the risk of a rather curious feral cat in the yard, I decided to spread out my drying days, which I probably would have done anyway given that one of the skins needed more scraping than the other two even after soaking a few days. I'm not sure if part of this was using slightly warmer water one day in the rinsing process, as it seemed a littler fibrous, but overall it dried out just fine with nothing noticeable about it.

To dry them, I covered a small piece of corrugated cardboard with plastic wrap and then stuck another piece of cardboard underneath to ensure the pins would hold in place. Then with scale side down and pulling the skin taunt as I went, I put pushpins around the edge, and out into the sun they went. Each skin was outside for somewhere between three to six hours. In the case of the first skin the pins pulled up a little as it dried, but having experienced that I did a better job pinning with the other two. 

My drying process involved putting them on the armrest of our glider and putting a piece of tree branch atop the cardboard to keep it in place (also to create a noise so I'd know if the cat got nosy-which thankfully didn't happen). 

Fish skin #1

Fish skin #2

Fish skin #3

And here's what I ended up with! While I didn't notice a smell when I was scraping them, being in the sun and the heat brought out the oils, which have made the skins somewhat smelly (although it has dissipated over the course of the two week since I dried them), so I'll be wiping it them down with alcohol before I use them.

Overall, I really enjoyed my first attempt at doing this! At this point, I'm undecided about what I'm might want to use them for, but I do have a few ideas for mini books in terms of both using them as part of the cover and as "textured paper" elements, so eventually there will be a another post about them! ♥️