Cyanotype experiments;Printing with the sun on fabric

Finished cyanotype prints with stencils used

I have been curious about Cyanotype printing for a while but I found it difficult to source the chemicals needed to create these wonders in blue. I was delighted to find a kit made up by http://www.stonecreeksilk.co.uk/ on the wonderfully tempting site,  http://www.silkpaint.com/  and purchased it straight away. I received two bags of powdered chemical; Ferric ammonium citrate and Potassium ferricyanide which sound quite ferocious but the three pages of information with the kit include a health and safety page which is reassuring that this is a simple process that just needs common sense.

The recipe on the kit suggests making up half the dry weight into a litre of printing fluid (to be stored in a brown glass bottle to protect it from daylight). I made up a smaller amount unsure of how ‘dark’ the studio had to be to mix the chemicals. I waited until night fall and in a reasonably dark studio with just a desktop lamp for light in the far corner of the room I mix the chemicals into an old brown jar ( herbal supplement jar). I painted the fluid on two squares of cotton and left them covered to dry overnight in the dark.

The next morning was gloriously sunny so I quickly put my cut out stencils on top of the dried fabric with a sheet of glass over everything on a garden table. (The sheet of glass was to keep the stencils in place and my curious two cats away from the fabric as they printed.) I couldn’t believe how quickly it changed colour; it turned a bluey grey within a few seconds and over about three minutes the shade turned to a deeper slate grey. I washed the chemicals out of the fabric and left them to dry, at first they were a cobalt blue and later a deeper ultramarine blue.

I used three different stencils for my first experiment; watercolour paper, architectural drafting paper and mount board. The drafting paper (white tracing paper) had an unexpected feature, the lines I had drawn on the stencil also became part of the stencil and appear as white lines in the finished print (see above).

I have also been experimenting with freezer paper as a stencil, which allows for more control; I ironed the freezer paper stencil to the cotton first and later painted the cyanotype fluid over the fabric in the dark. This eliminated my concerns about the stencils moving while transporting them to their sunny spot or during the developing stage. The cyanotype fluid was on the fabric for four days before I had a sunny day and some time to develop them, it seemed to make no difference. (they were already grey when I brought them out to the sun , so perhaps this is another advantage of using freezer paper stencils that were adhered before painting with printing fluid). I imagine u.v rays had reached them under my studio table during the four days.

I used freezer paper stencils for these cyanotype prints on cotton.