Totally Addicted to Sunprints

Thanks to Apartment Therapy, and of course Martha, I am now totally and 100% addicted to Sunprints.  Sunprints are made by harnessing the power of the sun to make a beautiful blue and white print.  Really, its just light sensitive paper, but its crazy fun and the results are gorgeous (see below).  Luckily, I am fortunate enough to be hosting the baby shower for my (baby) sister Nikita, and so I have a great outlet for all of my crafting urges. 

Fig. 1.  Let's get it started!

So immediately after reading the AT post, I scurried over to Amazon to find me some sun paper.  When the package arrived it was just like Christmas morning.  I was so stoked to get started, that I disregarded the package instructions that this needs to be done in direct sun light.  After a long day of work, I had the craft ants in my pants.  I did NOT want to wait until the weekend to get started.  I had a box full of alphabet magnets and all sorts of cute shit I wanted to sunprint right onto that paper.

So... the reason that you are supposed to make Sunprints in direct sunlight is because of shadows.  See Fig. 1.  My solution to this, is to rotate my creation 90 degrees every 2 minutes or so.  Like I said, ants in the pants.

Fig. 2.  Developing Process

It is supposed to take about 5 minutes, but because my sunlight was not optimal I gave it 10, to let each side get a few minutes of sun.  When it's ready, the background changes from blue to white. See Fig. 2.


So keeping the letters in place while rotating my paper was a tad bit of a challenge.  The set comes with a piece of plastic that is meant to hold your item in place, but it was more just getting in the way.   So once I decided I got all the exposure I needed, I scurried back to the house so that I didn't accidentally lose a letter and expose a part of the paper that I didn't want to expose.  And, of course, those ants wanted to see results.

Fig. 3. The Magic Begins

Once you get back indoors, you just develop the prints by running them under cool water for a few minutes, lay them out to dry and then sit back and watch the magic happen.  Fig. 3.  (oops, it looks like my essential crafting tools: red wine and multi surface cleaner are making a cameo appearance)

Fig. 4. Curly Pants

 So the prints develop from white to sky blue to deep dark blue pretty quickly.  Fig. 4.  The ants in my pants are satisfied!


The paper gets a little curly and rumply (like wet paper is known to do) during the developing process, so you have to stick them between some heavy books for a day or so to get them to lay nice and flat.

However, once you have flattened them, the results are pretty beautiful (in my humble opinion).  Fig 5.

Fig. 5. The Finished Product