All it takes is a few days soaking in a tea bath for the skin of arctic char or lake trout to lose its slime and transform into a beautiful material that can be used in sewing and crafts.
Two of the participants show their work after 'painting' fish skins onto a window to dry. The fish skins, which have been treated with an oil tanning solution, are usually brushed flat onto the window with a paintbrush.
"It's such an accessible way of making leather from something that often gets wasted," said Janey Chang, who led last week's workshop on fish skin tanning in the Nunavik community. "I love that." The skins can be dyed using other tannins or natural ingredients to produce bright reds, purples, blues and yellows. Some students turned their leather into beaded earrings and jewelry after they finished.
Chang and her students used willow bark, black tea and oak galls. She said they also mixed it up by experimenting with beluga oil — oil tanning being another method of processing skins — in an effort to discover what would have been used from the land around Puvirnituq to make fish leather long ago.