Is it really Tuesday? It sure doesn't seem like it around here! It's too quiet!! There's no Courtney... because she's in SCHOOL! As most of you know, she's been spending nearly every Tuesday here with Grandma G for the past 5+ years. What great times we've had... those are days I will treasure forever!
But guess what?! They're not ending! They're just being shortened considerably. Courtney will still be coming here every Tuesday... after school. She will get off the bus right at the end of our driveway... hurray!!
Soooo... with that said, let's get back to our normal posting, which should be called "Crafting with Courtney". :)
A couple of weeks ago, my friend LiEr mailed a gift for Courtney... something that her girls have had a lot of fun with. It was this package of Nature Print paper. It arrived, intentionally, on Tuesday!
The idea is to place objects on the paper and then put it out in the sun to see what happens. Courtney went right to work, selecting lots of little things we found around the house (even from my grandma's button stash). We pinned the special paper to cardboard, as directed, then placed the items on it.
Here's what we ended up with for our "test run":
I carried it out to the backyard. Some of the things slid a little, so I rearranged them a bit after setting it down in the grass. It really works fast, and you can already see the marks from where I moved some things! The blue paper faded quickly to nearly white.
We waited two minutes. Yep, that's all it takes! Then we brought it back into the house and started removing the little objects. See what it looked like underneath? The angle of the sun made for some interesting shadows, too:
After that, following the instructions, we put the sheet in water for one minute, then took it out to dry. This is what it looked like immediately after taking it out of the water:
Did you notice? The colors reversed in the water!
We did another sheet with different objects, things we found outside... leaves, flowers, etc. They were too wet for Courtney to take along home with her, so I let them dry and then pressed them in a book because the paper had gotten a bit wavy. I was surprised when I took them out of the book days later to find that the paper had gotten much darker! Here's the final result:
Isn't that paper just super-cool?! I wish I could've captured on camera the look on Courtney's face when she saw what the sun had done... it was pure surprised delight!! My face probably looked the same. :)
That was two weeks ago. We did a couple more sheets last week. Here's how they looked before pressing them in a book. I haven't peeked at them since. She can do that with me this afternoon.
Thanks, LiEr, for such a fun gift! We'll be enjoying it some more, since there are still eight sheets left!
9 comments:
Very cool! I was very surprised, too, at how mess-free and fast the paper was, overall. And I loved the water rinsing bit because I felt as if I were a real darkroom expert, except without the darkroom (and stinky chemicals). Am glad Courtney loved her first meeting with these sun print papers. Here's to many more gorgeous designs (and happy sunny days, before that awful white stuff falls, like frigid dandruff, from the sky).
P.S. So....... have the unicorns arrived? Tell me what you're feeding them. My girls betted on moonbeams and rainbows. I said glitter squids and sparkly jellyfish.
That sounds really interesting! Love the last picture- The design of the flower (?) is really nice! :)
Now, this will trigger the creative juices to produce.
Just think of all the shapes mother nature provides in the form of leaves and grass and how you could arrange them.
Dale
LiEr - "Frigid dandruff"... eeuuww!! Gosh, I hadn't thought about what to FEED those unicorns! They might not like that big pile of silage out there, huh?
C.G. - That flower is a plastic thing on a keychain (with some kind of advertising on it, if I remember right).
Yeah, Dale - I'm thinking of creating a scene. ;)
I wonder if you can iron the paper to make it perfectly flat. I've done this before with paper and it works, and I wouldn't think it would affect the designs because the prints are now fixed. Plus they're photosensitive, not heat sensitive.
I shall give it a try! Thanks!
Thank you so much for this great post. I had never seen sun print paper before. After reading this post AGES ago I bought a packet of sun print paper, and then promptly lost it in the house. It finally turned up and we made prints as a summer holiday activity. I blogged about it this week on Random Crafting Adventures.
Glad you had fun with it, Katie! Thanks for taking the time to report back!
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