Fading Test

Over the years I have made a few quilts which have included photos printed directly on fabric.

Before I started doing this in earnest, I did some research, and found that after the question of wash-ability had been solved, fading from light exposure was the biggest problem.

I found that there was a new (to me) ink being used, pigment based ink, which was said to be much more light resistant than the ordinary printer ink, which is dye based.

Luckily, by then, some printers using this new pigment ink were on the market, and I got hold of one.

I wanted to test for myself, to see if what they said was true.

I chose a random photo, which had all the main colours in it to some degree, and printed this same photo onto four pieces of fabric of the same kind.

This was in January 2003. So the test began, and it has been going on for more than 10 years by now.

One of the prints, shown in the photo above, has been kept in the dark ever since, except every time I had it out to check against the others. It is printed using pigment based ink.

Two of the prints have been stapled to cardboard and standing in a window facing west. The window is exposed to direct sunshine from 2PM to around 10PM when the sun is at the highest in summer.

The print above was printed using pigment based ink, and the photo shows how it looks after 10 years.

This is the other print that has been standing in the same window. This one was printed with dye based ink, and there is almost nothing left after 10 years.

During one of my firs tests, I found that this kind of ink showed considerable fading after just a few months, even if an UV spray was used. See photos on my website here.

The fourth of my prints was hung on a wall, 2-3 meters from a window. This is where we typically would hang a wall hanging, for instance, not directly in a window.

This print was also printed with pigment ink, and has fared quite well compared to the one kept in the dark.

In this photo I placed all the prints side by side when photographing, so they would all have the same light exposure in the photo. The two at the top have been in the window, the bottom left has been hanging on the wall, and the bottom right has been in the dark.

All the ones that have been exposed to some degree of light, have had a yellowing of the fabric itself, while the one kept in the dark still has very white fabric after 10 years.

See more on the topic on my website.

The test will continue, although I think I have found that I can trust my quilts to look almost as brilliant as when they were new, even after many, many years. Especially if they are not hung directly in a window.

🙂

Eldrid

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In case you have forgotten

This is what we used for typing a few years back:

And this is what used to be a computer:

I came across these two pages in a Visual Dictionary that I bought some years ago.  It is  great for finding English terms for things that you do not even know the term for in your own language, – like the different parts of a car engine.

Well, –  cars, bicycles, or musical instruments have not changed all that much, but other things have, – obviously.

Eldrid

Communications

The photo below came into my in-box a few days ago.  My husband sent it to me, and it made me stop to think, and marvel, – not just at the beauty of the colourful sunrise scene, but most of all at the technologies that made it possible for him to share this with me.

My husband is a fisherman on the high seas, – has been ever since he was out of school, – and during summer holidays when still in school.  In former years they were often fishing around the Western Isles and west of Ireland, some times around Iceland, Greenland, and for a short period  even on the other side of the globe; off the coast of South Africa and into the Indian Ocean.  These days they are most often just off the coast of Norway, or into the Barent Sea.  The time they stay out at sea varies, – from 4 to 7-8 weeks depending on various things.

This year we have been married for 35 years.

In the beginning we communicated over the radio, – the kind where you had to say “over” as a signal for the other person to speak, and then “over and out” when you were finished.  On the radio on board he contacted a land based radio station, where they put the call through the telephone to me.  So even though I was speaking on the phone, I still had to say “over”, which took some getting used to. Also, everyone else with a radio receiver could listen in on the conversations, so you had to be careful with what you said.  When they were far away, there would be days and days, even weeks, when they could not get through to the land based stations. If this lasted too long, he would sometimes call via land stations abroad, which was rather expensive.

Often the radio conditions were better during the night, so when we built our house, we had an extra phone outlet installed in the bedroom.  For several years, when my parents were visiting, they used to jump when the phone rang late at night. It took some getting used to that a midnight call did not signal a major crisis of some kind.  (My mother’s parents had the only phone in the area when she was growing up, and one of her tasks was to run and get the neighbours when they were wanted on the phone.  Midnight calls were always emergencies only, even when I was growing up. My mother is now 82 and is active on Facebook)

After a few years, the VHF radios took over, so we could skip the “over” stuff.  Also, normal radio receivers did not pick up the signals, so only other VHFs could listen in, – not every housewife along the coast.  (Earlier some women, – and men, – were notorious, – the radio was on in the kitchen all day, listening to the menfolk on board the boats talking, picking up information about the catch each boat were getting, – along with other tidbits.  It used to amaze me how much some people knew about the goings on up and down the coast).

Still, if conditions were bad, or if the boat was far out, it was back to the old radio.

Then mobile phones came around, but they were not good for long distances. However, when travelling close to the coast, it was, and is, possible to use them.  The first ones were not very “mobile”, by the way, – rather heavy contraptions that had to be mounted on the wall.

Our first stint at communicating via computers, was by some kind of telex-email.  We could write or copy text into a special software program which telexed the message to and from the boat via a satellite antennae. The program was never upgraded beyond Windows 98, and we still have a computer running Win98 that we “saved” for using this program.

However, satellite phones appeared big time a few years back, so the telex is out.  Now he calls me every day on the satellite phone when they are too far out for the mobiles.  They can now send and receive email, surf the internet, keep their Facebook profiles updated, and follow their children and grandchildren via blogs, emails, and online photo albums, – things we did not even dream about only ten-fifteen years ago.

So this is how he came to share this photo with me, – taken off the coast of North Norway at 05.20 in the morning on the 29th of April 2009.

Amazing!

Eldrid