Bark tanning
Bark tanning is a type of vegetable tanning. The same recipe you find here can be applied to a huge range of different plant materials. Here we will use bark. If you want to know more, you can visit the site "How is fish leather made".
Collecting Bark
To tann it you need bark from the woods. Most trees work, but a safe one is pine or Oak. To test if the bark has enough tannins you can chew a piece of bark (make sure it is a non-poisonous tree). If you get a bitter feeling in your mouth after a while, it has tannins. The more bitter, the more tannins. Exactly how much bark you need depends on how much tannin is in the bark, so this you will just have to learn through experience.
Cleaning
After you get the skins from the fish store you have to scrape off the excess meat and scales. When all the meat is gone we wash them in a mixture of soap and water. It is very important to be thurow in this first step in order to not end up with a smelly end result.
Preparing tanning liquid
Put the bark in a pot. Fill with water until it covers the bark. Bring it to a boil and then turn down the temperature and let it simmer for an hour. Now let it cool down to onder 20 degrees celsius. It is important throughout the whole process that the water is never higher than 20 degrees. An idea is to just leave it overnight.
Tanning
Now you are finally ready to tann the skins! Take some tanning liquid and mix with equal amount of water. This new liquid should be enough to for your skins to move a bit around in. Now, to avoid rot, you will have to make sure the skins get enough oxygen and get tanned evenly. To do this you will have to stir the liquid once in a while. To start off with, maybe several times an hour, and then less and less frequently. Now for each day for a week you are going to increase the strength of the liquid little by little. Each day remove one cup of water from your liquid and add one cup of concentrated tanning liquid. After about 7 days you can take your skins out and hang them to dry.
Softening
Now this is the last step. When the skin is still a bit damp, you can start to soften it. This is done by rubbing it between your hands. Don`t worry, the skin is not going to tear, you can do this pretty hard! The more you do this as it dries, the softher the finished result will be. If the skin dried a bit too fast before you got around to soften it you can just dip it in some water and it will become soft again.
