Monday, October 6, 2014

Blueprints, in color!

There is a mimosa tree that I walk past frequently when I'm walking my dog and I'm fascinated with the feathery leaves, so I brought one home and pressed it flat. Then got busy and didn't do anything with it for about a week, so now it's very flat and dry.


 First I used it for this weeks weekly leaf, then I spent some time on Sunday doing blueprints with it. Sometime back in the 90's I did quite a bit of blueprinting on fabric and even taught a class in my backyard for the quilt guild, but haven't done any since then. A few months ago I ordered the pretreated fabric and instead of blue and white I went with a pack of mixed colors.

It's very simple to do the prints. I put the fabric on a piece of cardboard, placed my leaf on top, then covered it with a piece of glass and put it into the sun for 10 minutes.

The fabric is then rinsed and the print appears. I tried all five colors.



I'm so happy with them, each one is 8 1/2 inches square. Not sure how I will use them yet, but I will.

For the weekly leaf I used the gelli plate, but wasn't real happy with the print.

There was a bit of paint still on the back of the leaf so I used that to print very carefully so that the leaf wouldn't fall apart. The print came out very pale, but was enough to give me some guide lines for stitching.

Weekly Leaf #40


Daily stitching updates

Line dance #273- #279


The Daily Paper #201-#207





Linked to "Off the wall Friday"

8 comments:

  1. I also did a lot of cyanotype printing back in the 90's. I mostly did blue, but also pink. I don't think it came in so many colors then. I still have some left over. I wonder if it would still work. Yours are terrific!

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  2. Wonderful! I am loving the Daily Paper, too. Can you remind me (us) how you are getting colour on the paper?
    Sandy

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  3. Each post you write opens my eyes to the beauty of hand stitching and the humble leaf. Thank you!

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  4. I love your leaf! We had a mimosa tree when I was young. but a blight killed nearly all of them in South Louisiana. Now they are few and far between.

    their flowers are like fairy umbrellas!

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  5. I love the leaf print in 5 colors-you have to do something really cool with that! Really enjoy your blog.

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    1. Thanks Jenny, I will do something cool with them.

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  6. I've never heard of blue printing - thank you for opening my eyes to this :-) do you need special fabric or do you great your own fabric with something?

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  7. Those leaf prints are great - I've never seen blueprint paper in lots of colours but am off to look for it now!

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