Cyanotype Flowers

 Every now and then I stumble upon a nice workshop that I would like to follow. 'Who would like to go along with me?', I then ask in my Facebook group of friends. There's always someone who wants and the nice thing about it, is that the composition of the group is always sort of a surprise. People that I would have never asked in person, because of my assumption that particular person would not really be interested in a workshop like that, react very enthusiastic. And sometimes people come along because they like the others in the group.

This weekend I went to a workshop for making cyanotypes of plants. This time my husband's cousin came with me. And that's exactly what I like: we don't see each other very much, but she has the same age as I do and we go along very well, actually. But I would never have thought about asking her to go with me. 

Anyway, this is what we came home with:

To get the image you impregnate aquarel paper with a chemical mix of carefully measured amounts of ammonium ferric citrate and potassium ferrocyanide. Then all you have to do is lay the object of you choice on the paper and let sunlight do its job. After a while the paper that's exposed to the light will turn a deep blue, named Pruisian blue. When you think the blue is blue enough you wash the chemical mix away with water and that's really all it takes. 

The workshop was just an introduction, but I will try this again at home, because I think you can do so much more with this technique. It's also possible to use this on fabric, for example. Or you can transfer nice black and white pictures to a transparant medium and lay it over your impregnated paper. Plenty of possibilities.