Blogging for Odin: Microwaves are Bad for Skin

Ok, spiders, I don't have a good excuse this time. Or even a bad excuse. I just kept doing other things instead of blogging. I'm sorry. I realize that whenever I say "I'll make it up by blogging twice!" that I almost never do. So I'm just gunna take it and say that, well, I missed last week. You do get two blogs this week, but that isn't a make-up.

I was hanging out with Laurie Schorr (the awesome lady who introduced me to the Light Factory) at her studio this weekend, working on salt prints. Those were a ton of fun, especially because we had just what materials were on hand. There was no measuring, no strict standards, no control. Just a bunch of salt packets from delivery food stashed in the drawer under the microwave, tap water and some plastic cups. We were mostly printing on scraps, everything was hurried along because it was just a few hours of time... and we got some great prints!

But that isn't what I'm talking about today, because I still want to do an amazing post on salt prints and I haven't got it together. I know, I'm terrible at everything. Thanks for the ego-boost, spiders.

cyanotype shrinky-dink

Today is about why it's a bad idea to microwave parchment. For some processes, you can speed up drying times by using irons, ovens and microwaves. Nothing bad happens, it's all great. Anthotypes work fine with these, and silver gelatin paper works fine with irons and regular ovens. I don't recommend microwaving silver gelatin paper, though. Normally, you can iron or bake cyanotypes, too. I've even microwaved wet cyanotypes on paper or cloth and had no bad results, but after some consideration, I really don't recommend that either.

Once upon a time, I tried to speed up the drying process for one of my cyanovellums by microwaving the print. The parchment, which is just animal skin, heated up rapidly and contracted into a tiny chip. Originally it was about the size of my palm, but it ended up no bigger than my thumb. The image remains intact, but it's very small, brittle and dense now. Kinda like a shrinky-dink, really.

I kept the shrinky-skin and glued it to a trash print just to provide backing and some surrounding color. It's framed and everything. There's a lesson in there about patience and letting things happen on their own time, but the important lesson is just to not microwave animal skin. It shrinks. A lot.