Sun printing

Since last year, the group has been planning to do some sun printing on our first playday in February. (We missed one in January because of a public holiday.) What happened? After days of fierce sun and heat, it rained. It was a dark cloudy day, with showers, with the temperature in the low twenties Celsius. Rather than have everyone waste materials, I did a test run early in the day.

I wet a piece of pre-washed quilters muslin and sloshed on some Setacolor Soleil in three colours. Soleil is sun-sensitive paint, which is available in a number of colours. It didn't actually blend as well as I'd expected, despite being quite runny. I'm used to their textile paints, which do blend nicely when used wet-on-wet. So I had to encourage it a bit. I dripped on some yellow spots for interest. The fabric was on a glass cutting board that I generally use for monoprinting, so I could move it outside easily. I scattered over some bobbly seed pods from a tree to act as a resist, and laid over some onion bags and set it outside under the eaves. The process was successful, so obviously there was enough infrared light to make the process happen. You can see the faint marks left by the seed pods and, perhaps not in the photos, a fine mesh pattern in the corners where the onion bag was lying. But it took the fabric literally all day to dry, as we decided to postpone until next fortnight. I'd like to try the Setacolour transparent paints, which will apparently also give a sun print. If we can only have some sun...