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| Eileen Flory, pictured collecting seaweed at Seal Rock at low tide. |
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Seaweed art? Color me pressed!
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By Niki Price
Oregon Coast Today
[PUBLISHED Aug. 10, 2007 • Check the tides for this week!]
Out in the early morning mist at Seal Rock, some beachcombers are raking for clams. Others, graduate students with backpacks loaded down with equipment, are cataloguing the life on the exposed rocks. Still more are just gawking, enjoying the sea stars, urchins, anemones and chitons exposed by the minus tide.
Eileen Flory, two Tupperware containers in hand, is looking for especially pretty seaweed. She plans to take her favorites home, where she’ll preserve their beauty on pieces of heavy paper, like wildflowers in a botanist’s journal. Flory marvels at their delicate anatomy, their deeply satisfying colors and their otherworldly structures.
One of her favorites is ulva taeniata, a bright green strand with undulating ruffles. Many times, she has transformed this intertidal resident, designed by nature to waft in the ocean’s currents, into a two-dimensional work of art.
“I love the way that, when it’s pressed, all those ruffles have floated against each other, giving different thicknesses and different darknesses,” she said.
Flory, a former exhibits planner at the Oregon Coast Aquarium and, before that, the Science Museum of Minnesota, has been pressing seaweed for 20 years. Although any low tide will expose some specimens, a minus tide (that which is predicted to sink below sea level) offers the most diversity in color and structure. She goes out with small containers with lids (“buckets just encourage over-collecting, which is easy to do,” she said), and finds specimens small enough to be arranged on a letter-sized piece of paper. She collects them in the Tupperware, covers them in seawater, secures the lid on top, and takes them home.
From there, Flory said, the process is “just like pressing flowers or leaves in a book, only wetter.” She first places the seaweed in cake pans filled with clean tap water, against a relatively light background that makes visualizing easier.
Some pieces can be lifted out with tweezers or hands and placed on the paper, while others must be delicately lifted out with the paper itself. Either way, part of the fun is arranging the seaweed into pleasing patterns; the other part, of course, is realizing that only so much careful positioning can be done, and that chance is integral to the beauty of the final product.
Flory prefers to press each species separately, on off-white stock that complements the browns, greens and reds that she finds at Seal Rock, but said that others might choose to press more than one type together — “that would show who their neighbors are in the tide pool,” she said — on any color paper they find interesting.
Once each sheet of paper is ready, she’ll place it between two cotton blotters, which are then sandwiched between squares of corrugated cardboard. Flory makes a Dagwood sandwich of these pieces, then places several heavy books on top. Then, she waits.
She changes the blotters every 24 hours for two days, then every few days after that. Depending on weather conditions and blotter thickness, the pressed seaweed should be ready within a week, Flory said.
The finished product can be framed for wall display, or scanned and reproduced on any craft surface. Flory sometimes makes notecard sets, which she gives as gifts or sells at Newport area gift shops.
She also keeps a notebook of her treasures, the best specimens protected by plastic sleeves in a three-ring binder. Some are marked with their species name, but others are not — identifying these beauties is a difficult task, even for those with training in the subject. Flory doesn’t worry too much about identification, but she does wish she had paid more attention to recordkeeping.
“They change through the seasons. They’re growing in the summer, and they die back in the winter. For example, this,” she said, holding up two very different looking pressed pieces, “is the same species as that. But it’s got a little different form to it right now.
“Something that I really have lapsed with is putting the date on them, because if there’s any science to it, you want that date and location recorded. (A professional naturalist) would write down exactly where it came from, and when.
“But I don’t do for science. I do it for beauty.”
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| Some of the seaweed pressed by first-time-presser Niki Price, author of this article and editor of the Oregon Coast Today. |
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How to press seaweed
This process, courtesy of Eileen Flory, allows you to turn seaweed into pieces of art, for the wall, the scrapbook or just for fun. This process will result in about 10 sheets of pressed seaweed. The blotters and cardboard, once made, can be reused in future pressings.
What you’ll need
Plastic bowls with lids
Towels
Clean water source
Two light colored trays or cake pans
10 sheets of heavy 81/2 by 11 paper, off-white
or white in color
40 blotters, cut to roughly the same
size as the paper (cotton, rags, or paper towels)
40 pieces of corrugated cardboard,
cut to the same size
Heavy books
Optional: Tweezers, scissors, X-Acto knife
First day
1. At a low or minus tide, search the exposed tide pools for small, intriguing seaweed specimens. Fill the plastic bowls with sea water, and collect your favorites. Try to pick only what you’ll feasibly use in a single sitting — they won’t last long.
2. Cover a table with towels. Set out all your supplies: the bowls of seaweed, two trays filled with clean water, stack of paper, blotters and cardboard squares.
3. Select the seaweed you’re ready to press, and place it in the clean tap water in the first tray. In the second, submerge a piece of paper. Move the seaweed into the second tray, and arrange it as you like.
4. Holding the paper on both ends, and using great care, slowly pull the paper vertically out of the water (the more delicate seaweed will adhere to the paper as the water sheets off; others may require more manipulation). The seaweed pieces usually adhere to the paper by themselves. Place the paper on the towels, and finish arranging.
5. Create a pressing sandwich in this order: cardboard, blotter, pressed seaweed on paper, blotter, cardboard. Set aside.
6. Repeat steps 3 through 5 to create nine more sandwiches, stacking one on top of the other (you will have used roughly half of the blotters and cardboard). Place several heavy books on top, and tuck the project away until tomorrow.
Second day
1. Carefully dismantle the package (the blotters will stick). Reassemble the Dagwood using the remainder of the blotters and cardboard. Restack and replace the books.
2. Dry the used blotters by hanging outside or running through the laundry. The cardboard should dry on its own.
Third day
Repeat instructions from the second day
Through the week
Replace the blotters and cardboard every few days until the seaweed and paper are dry. Mark each sheet with the date and location of collection. Enjoy!
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