Clare has always had a love for all things bright and floral, her most obvious demonstration of this was her amazing knitted garden that captured the public's imagination and admiration as people flocked to see it on display at both the RHS show at Malvern, and at Gloucester Cathedral. Clare was always happy recording nature through the seasons with her iPhone on her daily walks with Maggie the Jack Russell. A lot of Clare's photographs demonstrated a keen eye for composition (except when she would deliberately take 'wonky' photos as she new non-straight pictures really irritate me)! 

But in more recent months, a much more primative form of photography caught Clare's imagination as a means of capturing the natural beauty of flowers and plants collected on her daily walks.  Cyanotype is a very rudimentary photographic process, discovered in 1842 and very popular with Victorians before the advent of the camera.  Although primarily developed for the copying of diagrams as blueprints, it also became (and still is) popular as a means of capturing natural objects such as plants and flowers in a ghostly silhouette form more akin to an x-ray than a photograph. 

No sooner had Clare's cyanotype starter kit popped through the front door, the dining room was comandeered as a new studio space in which to experiment.  Firstly two chemicals with long scary names were mixed create a yellow liquid that was brushed liberally (maybe a bit too liberally) over a sheet of thick paper.  Clare then carefully arranged a selection of pressed plants and flowers collected on her walks, onto the dried paper to make a pleasing composition.  A sheet of glass was then placed on top, before the composition was taken out into the summer sun where the magic began.  The photo-sensitive chemicals exposed to the sun began to turn blue while the areas hidden by Clare's composition remained white.  Once developed, the exposed paper was rinsed under the kitchen tap to stop the process before the new masterpieces were then left to dry. 

Clare being a determined sort and not afraid to experiment, repeated this process numerous times with a wide variety of found plants and flowers until she found the combination that best exploited this technique. In fact, one of my favourite compositions (see photograph of the cyanotype with the unusual purple background) didn't come up to her standards and was dismissively thrown into a skip that was in the process of being filled at the time!  

It was great to hear Clare's regular updates from her cyanotype activities, with details of what species of plant really worked and which didn't.  Luckily a lot of Clare's cyanotypes were photographed so they can be shared here.