Sunprinting, Chapter 3

A sunprint made from a negative transparency
of platic fencing. I am using this print in my
new quilt, below, Turtle Spirit

 Despite the winter weather, I have dreams of summer and sunshine, and cyan printing helps me remember that warm weather is coming again.
My last post promised to show you how to turn a cyan toned sunprint into a sepia toned one. Why would you want to change it? Well, because you may need a different color for what you are doing. If you tone to sepia, the print will be lighter in tone, and you can also paint or otherwise add color to it, if you want to. Alternatively, you could use setacolor paints, which allow you to print in every color of the rainbow. In my case, I am printing several sizes of my grandmother using various techniques, then sewing them onto a quilt she made that I recently repaired and recreated.

For sepia toning, everything you need is in your kitchen.

While there are other ways, this is how I turn a cyan print into a sepia toned print:
You will need 1 - 2 T. of baking soda
2 C. hot (but not boiling) water
Glass or plastic pan to fit your image (size matters only if you're working with watercolor paper; fabric can be scrunched)
8 - 10 teabags (black tea, orange pekoe, Lipton's)
Wooden spoon
What to do:
Dissolve 1 T. of baking soda in hot water in a glass or plastic pan. Let the water cool slightly, then agitate your sunprint in the mixture until the color begins to fade. Quickly remove and rinse in clear water. This happens very quickly. You now have a yellow print, the interim stage. You might want to try a test print before you do more. Let dry. Iron flat, unless you are working with a paper print.
Note: You may need up to 2 T. of baking soda, depending on how many prints you are working with, and how large the pieces are. Multiple prints will begin to exhaust the baking soda chemical reaction, and you will need to add fresh water and baking soda.

Yellow print, the interim stage: it looks like
nothing is there, especially before it dries.

Make a tea dye bath:
While your print is drying, bring the tea kettle to a boil, and steep 8 - 10 teabags in 2 C. of water for 10 minutes. You can adjust the color by adding more or less water, more or fewer teabags. After 10 minutes, remove the teabags and discard.
Pour the tea dye bath into your tray or pan, and submerge your yellow print. Leave it there at least 10 minutes or until it is the color you want. Play around with determining the color tone you want in your test print. Also, if there is any sediment in your tea dye bath, or if you are scrunching a large piece of fabric, the color may be uneven. Stirring while the yellow print is submerged will help keep the color more even if you are concerned about that.

Sepia-grandma and cyan-grandma. Now I have more color options.

I will make a series of these prints in various sizes to create a collage composition for my piece. More to come! In the meantime, I am finishing the composition on Turtle Spirit, which also incorporates sunprints.

This is a detail shot of my design wall showing my newest piece,
Turtle Spirit, in progress. The side panels both have sunprints
appliqued in place. The turtle, though blue, is an indigo dye, and
not a sunprint.

Sunprinting, Chapter 2

On the left, two sunprinted fabrics; on the right, the same
image on paper.

If you read my last post, you'll see how I used the sun to print the images of my grandmother you see here. Since you can only really see the quality of the printed image after it has completely dried, I waited. It's winter, and my drying rack is next to my furnace, so I didn't have to wait very long! I ironed the fabric and had a look.

The same image printed twice. On the left, no clamped glass was used.

As you can see in the picture, above, I ended up making two prints on fabric. Why? Because I forgot a crucial step in obtaining a crisp print, especially when using transparencies, and especially in the winter: I forgot to cover my fabric with a piece of clear glass clamped in place. The resulting blurry print on the left is blurry, in part, because I failed to clamp the glass on top, making a secure contact print. (It's also blurry because I did not iron the fabric flat enough before printing it.) After it dried, I realized my omission, and immediately reprinted the image, as you see on the right. The result? Even though my fabric is old, when printed correctly, it still gave me a decent print. That has been my experience over the 25 years I have used this process, and is also why I never hesitate to buy yardage when purchasing pre-treated fabrics.

The same image on treated paper.

While I was at it, I grabbed an old but unopened package of treated sunprinting paper I picked up at a recent library sale. These are the Super Sunprint Kits often found in museum stores. I clamped the glass on top of the paper as described in my last post, opened my sliding back door, and let it sit on the threshold dangling over the snow to catch the sun. It was later in the day, and it was dangling, so you can see that there was still some blurring that occurred as a result of the position of the sun and the minor movement of the substrate the paper was clamped onto. I got one very clear print on paper, and the two blurry ones are interesting, and will still be used. You may notice that the print on this text-weight paper is not as dark as on fabric.

The print on the left is on fabric. On the right, is a print
on high quality watercolor paper.

Each surface gives a slightly different effect. Notice how the contrast is increased on the watercolor paper print here. When rinsed, the background reverts to white, and since the image I used had a lot of negative space, it produced a crisp print.

Mother Shrine uses a sunprint.

In Mother Shrine, the cyanotype print on fabric of my mother is also in high contrast. The difference between this one and the watercolor paper print is that the image of my mother is printed on fuschia fabric instead of white or aqua, therefore the contrast is lessened, though the image is still clear.

You may be wondering where the variety of pre-treated fabrics and paper come from. Although you can purchase cyan printing chemicals and treat your papers and fabrics yourself, I have always ordered mine from Blueprint Printables. They have been around longer than anyone else, have consistently high quality products, and great customer service. You can even send them yardage of your own fabrics to treat. Tune in next time to see some examples of that, and about how to turn a cyan print to sepia.

Cyan print on the left; on the right, a cyan print on watercolor
paper turned sepia. It's really easy!