One of the “Aha!” artsy discoveries I made in Boston was Fish Leather. Now maybe you knew all about it, but I didn’t. And it’s beautiful! It looks like suede on one side and has a glossy.scale-like pattern on the other side. Here’s a piece that I purchased from Bead+Fiber.
There’s a shop called The Fish Leather Co in the UK that’s specializing in this material, and you can find out from their site how it’s made. It’s apparently a long process and different species of fish have different kinds of leathers. Definitely interesting to read about! Fish Leather is eco-friendly and taken from non-endangered fish (unless you’re the fish that gets turned into leather, I guess).
I found a shop on Etsy that has hand-crafted Fish Leather jewelry – it’s called ModernNaturals19 and the artisan does nice work – see the cuff bracelet below. You’d have to sew a bunch of these together to make a garment of any kind, but the material itself is beautiful and I can see it being used for small adornments and decorative objects. Dang. Fish leather. Who woulda thought?
So if you add one of your little faces will it be a mermaid? Very interesting product.
Oooooh – I love this idea!!
Share a pic when you make it?
Hi Lyn, we’re really glad you’ve discovered this great material and decided to mention us in this article. We are based in the UK but we do offer free worldwide delivery so everyone can have a go with fish leather in their crafts.
Thanks for the note! I am unpressed with this product and like your website very much – I especially enjoyed reading about your business, “We operate this company from home in our small chapel in Wales and through buying our products, you’ll be helping us to live our dream lifestyle. We recently moved to the Welsh countryside and with the relaxed pace of life saw this as the perfect opportunity to create our own businesses. ” Best of luck – I’ll be back to visit your site soon!