Blueprints

For our next project we (or rather I) decided to make use of all this sun we've been enjoying lately and see what happens when the sun bleaches colored construction paper. The girls and I gathered various objects from around the house, including toys, forks, a cheese grater, etc, and we taped the objects onto sheets of blue and black construction paper. Then we placed them out in a location that was sure to receive lots of sun for several hours at a time. Then we waited. Normally the waiting would be difficult for a three-year-old and a one-year-old, but we had story time, lunch and naps to keep us plenty busy while we let the sun do its work. When the girls woke up from their naps we retrieved our papers, gently peeled the objects and the tape from them, and marveled over the result. The black construction paper remained unchanged while the blue paper had been altered to a much lighter shade of blue except for the areas of the page that had been covered by the objects we taped down. The objects left "blueprints" of themselves on the papers, some more distinct than others. We found that the objects that didn't stand too high off the ground and that easily laid flat, such as the small cheese grater, made better "blueprints" than the tall objects. Now that we know which objects work best we can try this again with greater success. We also found that it is helpful to secure the pages to the ground as even the slightest breeze will flip the paper and rend the experiment useless.