Re: glyoxal bouncing: How do you know it's hard?

Hey All,

Yesterday I tried printing gum on the 1% glyoxal-hardened gelatin that I
coated glass with the other day. It didn't work (the gum brushed on
smoothly and easily and coated nicely, but sloughed off immediately in
development). Whether this means it wasn't hardened enough, or by Kees'
hypothesis, too much, or something else, I don't know and don't really
care at this point, because I spent the rest of the day testing what
seems so far (knock on wood) to be a foolproof method for printing gum
on glass.

I won't bother to share the method here, because it is based solely and
completely on the principle of tooth and would expose me to further
ridicule and derision on the subject, and I just don't have the energy
for it.

But anyway, back to the glyoxal. I scraped the glyoxal-hardened gelatin
off the glass while it was still wet and found it to be very
interesting stuff. It's rubbery, elastic; you can take a section of it
and stretch it like a rubber band, or a rubber sheet, and if you wad it
up into a ball, it bounces. My bit of alt-photo trivia for the day.

Since I coated some papers with glyoxal-gelatin the other day, maybe I
will print some of those papers and see what I think about the speckling
question. The way I look at sharing information is not that any
individual bit of information means much by itself, but that the more
information we have collectively, the sooner we'll be able to start to
see what the elephant looks like as a whole. In the meantime, it seems
to me that the tooth of the pudding is in the printing. (Gawd, I know
I'm tired when I start making puns). Bye,

Katharine
Received on Sun Feb 6 11:58:31 2005