One month ago I had the pleasure of meeting Audrey and Scott Armstrong. They arrived at SeaTac Airport, flying in from Anchorage Alaska. There they met Audrey’s daughter Alicia, and son-in-law Kai, who had also just landed after flying in from North Carolina. The family had not had an opportunity to be together physically since pre-covid times. Though all were exhausted from travel, this was a joyous and long awaited reunion.
Audrey came to teach a workshop at the Bainbridge Artisans Resource Network, or BARN. As an Athabaskan and Koyukan fisherwoman and artist, she came to share her knowledge about preparation and use of fish skins as a material for art making. Her family was incredibly helpful to all the students, encouraging us and supporting Audrey’s instructions every step of the way.
On the first of our four day workshop, we met in the kitchen at BARN. This is our “messy” day. Rubber gloves and aprons, ulu’s, cutting boards and paper towels, all came in handy.
Lucky for us, we have a great teacher, sharp ulu’s thanks to Scott, and a good space in the Culinary Arts Studio at BARN, (aka, the kitchen), to scrape all the meat and fat off of the skins. Many of the skins were collected by students in the class to be shared with everyone, and Audrey also brought many skins for us to use.
As I shared in my previous blog, (https://www.melindawest.com/fish-skin-preparation-into-a-material-for-craft/) preparation of the skins looks a little like this. After we scraped the skins, we rinsed them well in cold water. Then we put a few drops of Dawn dishwashing soap in a ziplock bag with the skins and clean cold water and agitated the mix to draw out some of the extra oils in the skins.
After a time we rinsed the skins again and put them in a ziplock bag and topped them off with 70% rubbing alcohol. We left them in the refrigerator overnight for a quick-tanning process.
The next day we were back, ready to learn to use the pattern Audrey had worked out for us that would fit the molds she had brought for us to stretch and dry our sewn fish skins around.
I’m sure it helps to know how to sew, but it was slow going – each stitch taken in this moist, tough, slightly wiggly material took effort!
Audrey suggests we tack the base in a few spots to help with placement.
Scott will next put a book on top of each of these to weight them. There are fans at each end of this table that will run all night. Audrey said this “drying” step usually takes 48 hours but with the fans available we will squeeze this step into under 24 hours.
As the summer weather lingers into October and Mt Tahoma glows in the golden light, our fish skins are transforming into new entities. Each student in this workshop has brought with them their wealth of experience and knowledges. I’ll soon share what came next.
Thank you for listening.
I apologize for any mistakes I may have made in this retelling.
