What to do with Blue Suede?

And no, I don't know how to make shoes. There probably isn't enough suede to make shoes, and it's too thin anyway. Anyway, my first experiment with printing cyanotype onto leather didn't work out. I should have noticed something was wrong because as soon as the chemistry was applied to the suede, it turned dark blue. I figured that might just be because it was so saturated, but the chemistry itself is greenish and normally paints onto cloth or other surfaces as a yellow stain, not a blue one.

The end result was that today I left the skin outside in bright sunlight for several hours, with a large branch over it to cast shadows. Nothing happened. The skin somehow developed itself during the coating process. When I washed it off, hoping for some patterning from the exposure, I found nothing. Well, no patterning. I did find that the skin produced an awful lot of suds, which was odd. I had not cleaned or soaped it prior to coating. I got it shipped to me, pulled it out of the package and coated it. That means there must have been some kind of chemicals left from either the tanning or the cleaning process at the tannery left in the suede.

I can only assume those chemicals reacted with the cyanotype material and caused it to develop instantly. No idea what else could have happened, since I coated a ton of parchment with the same chemistry, at the same time, in the same light. The parchment's fine! So now I have a second skin in the washing machine on a delicate rinse cycle to get out any residual chemistry. Then I'll run it in the dryer and see what happens with that.

As for the blue suede, it's being annoying. Rinsing the chemistry out of it is taking a very, very long time and many, many washes. Basically the thing is a chamois, so it being incredibly absorbent is no surprise. The sheer amount of chemistry locked in there, though, is distressing since it was all basically wasted.

For further experiments, I'm going to cut the pre-washed skin into sections. I'll then try painting a dilute glue solution onto one and a gelatin solution onto another. Hopefully this kind of sizing will reduce the amount of chemistry involved in creating a print on the material, and make the washing cycle much faster. We'll see how it goes.

What will I be doing with this blue-dyed skin? Well, I'm going to keep it. I'll use it as backdrops for some small object photography.