It’s all got a bit manic here and I’m making some mistakes with my film choices. Lots of them. Basically I’m using whatever comes my way…which means that often I can’t get the processing done. I need a batch of colour chemicals for 120 film – but I don’t drive and postage rates are high so they might as well be on the moon.
SO. Keep it simple – do some polaroids on some expired film and lift em…job done. I even watched a tutorial.
What follows is a how NOT to polaroid lift.
First of all, the pics turned out okay – praps a bit greyish blue, as the film is expired as usual to keep costs down, but better than last time. I had pictures.
So – I looked at the tutorial closely, with squinty eyes and everything – my, that water looked nice and warm. So very hot water was used.
By the end of the first evening I’d breathed in a lot of chemicals, peeled some layers and poked them around with a paintbrush, then chased my etherial gel like pictures round a developing tray or two, caught them on some different types of paper, hung them up in the garage and gone to bed feeling like quite a happy lassy.
Fortunately, the garage door was locked with the key in the morning so I couldn’t check them before I went out. I can’t unlock the bloody thing myself, so it wasn’t until the evening that I discovered that all four of them had DIED in the night.
An anguished tweet was issued.
The next night I did nothing.
BUT – this thing has to be done. So, I pulled up my big girl pants and thought really hard about how I could mess around with the pics without actually killing them.
This time, it seems prudent to do a ‘before’shot.
The crazy decorative edging was peeled off, and then what was left was popped into some warm water. This meant I could peel off the black square that makes the backing. I might have done this a little early…here’s another Leicester beauty spot!
And, as threatened, another photo of the new Little Bird SOS studio that we’ve been settling in to this last couple of weeks…well, mostly. My bedroom is FULL OF WOOL, as is the dining room table. Oops.
Anyway, for the last two Polaroids (below) I just kept the backing on and took off the fiddly silver strips. Welcome to Polaroid half assed peels. They’re scanned on black paper so you can imagine what they look like a little better. I had a brief escape to the moors just South of Hebden Bridge as the House Mamil wanted to do a crazy bike ride. The kids and I tagged along so I could navigate my first solo grown up hike. Okay, that’s cheating really as one of my offspring is bigger than me and just as good with a map, but hey – we still got a bit lost. If it wasn’t for my compass we’d still be there (I stupidly didn’t listen to the nice hippy wizard man who stopped for a chat). This lack of navigational prowess/listening to good advice is worrying as the lanky offspring is away for the weekend soon to do his Duke of Edinburgh award. Hmm. At least I know he’s very calm in the face of being really quite lost and gradually sinking deeper and deeper into a marsh.
I rather liked some of the leftover backing papers too!
And that’s it. I’m not entirely sure I’m going to be visiting this again in a hurry, but you never know!
This blog was first published on 52rolls.net