Crafty · Life Posts · Sewing

A Fishy Tale

I was super excited to find out that I accidentally uploaded all my pictures from the last 30 days to the Cloud. While I didn’t have all of them back, I ended up with the quilt show pictures at least and a ridiculous number of adorable Fancy pictures. 🙂 

If you’re not sick of them, you might see some more quilt pictures after all! There are some pretty cute baking themed ones that would go perfectly with some recipes from my 25 recipe list. 

One of the coolest things we saw at the quilt show was a demo on fish leather. I had absolutely no idea this was even a material that you could get! 

The presenter, Pam Manthei and her husband Joe, import the leather from a tannery in Iceland. Their company is called Fiskur Leather and all the skins are made from fish that were caught for food in the wild and are not farmed fish or caught for their skins. They are dyed with environmentally friendly dyes and the water is heated by geothermal energy. How cool is that?! Apparently the fish skin is fairly neutral in color and takes dye really well. 

How amazing are these colors?

The leathers are made from cod, wolf fish, salmon, and perch. There were so many different textures and colors! The perch had this lovely large textured scale pattern and the wolf fish had these cool spots on it. The salmon has a very small scale pattern. K bought some black salmon leather to make a wallet for her Dad, who is an avid salmon fisherman. I believe he black piece in this photo might be a salmon leather. 

The vendor, Pam, was very nice and extremely knowledgeable about her craft. She was so excited to hear that K and I were sewists! That was actually a pretty common dynamic we heard a lot there. Apparently we’re part of a new trend for younger people to get back into sewing. It’s fun to be trendy sometimes (although I was sewing before it was cool.)

Pam makes lovely things, most of which you wouldn’t even know were made from fish skin! Some of her purses really embrace the natural fish shape and other things completely catch you unawares.

These pictures all have elements of fish leather in them. See if you can tell where they are. I’ll tell you in the captions/

The bright silver strips in this picture are the fish skin.
This one is a little easier! All of it is fish leather, except the blue background square, which was felt, I think.
The hills in the windmill picture are fish leather and I think all or most of the birds.

If you’re interested in knowing more about the fish leather, especially since K and I only heard part of the demo, please visit the Fiskur Leather website. http://www.fiskurleather.com/about-us.html

The whole expo, but especially this interesting material, reminded me how much I don’t know. I’m excited to learn and discover more!