I spent most of February with my shoulder to the wheel, doing the quilting on a huge art quilt (more on that soon). I reached the point where the creative part was done, and I was doing hours of important but repetitive fill work, and I got bored. Time for a wet cyanotype break!
The weather has been been wildly variable here in my part of Pennsylvania, and some very warm days brought out the first of the snowdrops. I set up a few flowers on treated cotton sateen, along with big root geranium leaves (they are true perennials that overwinter with some green leaves). I also set up a panel with an evergreen Christmas fern frond and two huechera leaves on silk noil I had treated. The silk has a lot of sericin that makes the uptake of the chemicals uneven and variable.
The day, which had started out sunny and warm, quickly deteriorated, and when I brought the prints in, the un-rinsed versions were only mildly promising:
When rinsed and finished, the snowdrop print was fairly subdued:
The fern on silk was a bit more interesting. These are experiments, and I learn something every time, and even a print that may not end up as a solo act has potential for patchwork. So while I was not ecstatic about these they were still fun to do.
A few days later, looking to procrastinate on my quilting, I set up some more prints for exposure. I had five of the sweetgum leaves I had preserved with glycerin in the fall left to use. I was out of treated sateen fabric, but a rummage around produced some more of the commercially treated muslin I used this
past summer
For this round I was back at my old tricks with a spray of diluted pink textile paint, and another of diluted washing soda to drive the chemical reactions.
The last sweetgum leaf, paired with a Christmas fern:
And finally, two smaller panels, one with another attempt at a snowdrop:
And one with more geranium leaves and alpine strawberry leaves.
These were off to a good start with lots of sunshine and heat, but there was snow in the forecast, so I covered the panels with clear plastic and left them out. Here's what I woke up to the next morning:
Things were looking pretty fancy under all that snow:
Here are the un-rinsed prints, with lots of good splotching and color variations:
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Here are the finished prints. The pink tones are from the textile paint, all the rest are from the breakdown of the cyanotype chemicals. These give me such a thrill!
I managed to capture some of the delicacy of the snowdrop blossom here. Flowers are tricky with this process, but the combination of sun and freezing temperatures worked out well this time.
These last two I layered, quilted, and sent off as my donation to the
SAQA Spotlight Auction for the up coming conference. I hope they bring the winning bidder(s) some of the same joy I had in making them.
If you are new here, welcome! I've been detailing and documenting my experiments with wet cyanotype in great detail; you can read it in reverse chronological order by clicking the Wet Cyanotype tab in the top header, or click here.
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