Update!!!
She earned a nick-name this weekend..."Stinker"!
When my snakeskins showed up from my buddy(they had been skinned out and either on ice or froze since March), they were absolutely rancid, putrid.....whatever you want to call it...they were in bad shape!(found out later, that something had gone wrong)
I immediately got them into the sink to wash them with Dawn, and while doing that the outer skin just slipped right off, scales and all! With that a lot of the color/pattern also went with it.
Ater working on both of them for a couple hours, I had what I was praying would be usable skins. These meant a lot to me as they were from the Pig-Gig snake wrangle in the snow. When we caught them, I knew right off they were meant for my soon to be 1st selfbow. So I wanted to save these bad!
So after washing, rinsing, and getting rid of all the loose outer skin, I got them tacked to some boards to dry over night and see what I had....my fingers were crossed....
The next morning I cut them off the boards and what I found were some of the prettiest rattle snake skins I'd ever seen and they were very smooth without the outer layer.
But since they had lost some color, I decided to stain/dye the back of the bow black to hopefully make the skins really "pop"....I think it worked!
One skin on, but not dried yet...
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The skins had beautiful "coon tails"...
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You can see how the black under the skin came though between where the scales were...
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Black leather dye was used for the black color. I use it for wood arrws as well...
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As you can see here, the snake had a scar on it's skin, it came through as black...pretty cool...
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