Re: Printing on fabric

Hello Lorsi,

I coat by brush. I like a reasonably large area of cloth around my
image for matting and handling, so immersion would be expensive. Thin
and even medium fabrics need, in my experience, to be completely
saturated with the Kallitype. When I started I was trying to "stretch"
the chemistry (not use too much). In the end this caused far too many
sheets with flawed coatings, and actually cost me money :-(

Here is the "standard" method (my variation is below): Put a few layers
of "paper towels" on a flat surface. Lay your fabric over the paper
towels. Coat by brush (just a cheap house painting brush) with a
liberal amount of chemistry. I use 30ml for an 11x14 neg (12.5x15.5
coated area), this will be different for other fabrics and processes.
About 1/3 of your chemistry will end up in the paper towels. Now put
down clean paper towels and repeat. Ouch that is an expensive waste,
but less expensive than all the ruined prints I made trying to use less
chemistry!

Here is my modified method (I hate to waste money). This is easier to
show than to explain in words. This only helps if you are coating a
number of sheets at the same time. Do your first sheet exactly as
above, but don't replace the damp paper towels. Having a damp, semi
saturated base helps with this system. Now put TWO sheets down on the
damp paper towels and again coat the top sheet with 30ml (for 11x14).
About 20ml will saturate the top sheet and the remaining 10ml will go
into the bottom sheet. Hang the top sheet to dry and put a new sheet
under the semi coated sheet. The semi coated sheet has about 10ml of
chemistry in it. Take 20ml (there is your savings) and coat the semi
coated sheet. Again, the top sheet will hold about 20ml, already has
10ml, so the remaining 10ml will go into the bottom sheet. Keep
repeating with 20ml per sheet (as opposed to the standard 30ml).

It would "seem" easier to coat with 20ml on a totally non absorbant
material. I tried for a while to coat on a sheet of plex. "I" couldn't
get an even coat that way :-(

As to the costs of getting things in Turkey, you've probably tried of
the these, but...... B&S sells the Ferric Oxalate in powdered form (to
avoid paying the shipping on water). See if you can find silver nitrate
locally, it is very easy to mix both solutions from powder.

On Tuesday, March 9, 2004, at 01:49 PM, Loris Medici wrote:

> Great site! (I remember it from previous messages -
> great work indeed; inspiring!)
>
> Thank you very much for the tips. How do you coat? Not
> by immersion I hope; I cannot use that much kallitype
> chemistry as I'm importing it from the US (B&S) to
> Turkey (I'm in Istanbul) and it is costly due to intl.
> transport fees.
>
> Thank you,
> Loris.
>
> --- Tom Ferguson <tomf2468@pipeline.com> wrote:
>> I do a lot of kallitype on cloth printing. A few
>> comments:
>> ...
>
>
--------------
Tom Ferguson
http://www.ferguson-photo-design.com
Received on Wed Mar 10 09:35:29 2004