Greetings,all! First off, I'd like to say I'm thrilled to have found this forum. I suppose I should introduce myself. My name is Marius Moore, I live in Florida, and I make my living selling Polaroid Transfers at art fairs throughout the country (mainly Forida and the midwest, though I will be in California this fall). So here's my problem. I've been getting these bubbles that form in the emulsion of the image transfers. The bubbles grow larger and larger, until they pop and tear the emulsion. They occur after I remove the transfer from a 1:4 vinegar/water bath and place it in running water for the rinse. I ran into this problem with Arches paper, and switched to Fabriano Artistico 140lb hot press. This solved the problem, until now. I called Polaroid, but they didn't know what's causing it. Any ideas?

-- Marius Moore (mariusmoor@aol.com), May 28, 2003

Answers

try using less vinegar, maybe 1+5

-- jt allen (jtallen@charter.net), September 04, 2003.

Thanks to those that responded to my dilemna, both on the forum and off. I think I've figure it out. I never had problems with the bubbles before, and nothing new was added to the equation (or so I thought). I tried the suggestions offered, to no avail (thanks again though). The transfer would bubble when it hit the water bath/rinse after the vinegar bath. The only thing I could think of was that maybe the tap water had changed. I tried placing the print in a bath of distilled water between the vinegar and water rinse and voila-no more (or very little) bubbles! For some reason, the transfer was reacting to my tap water, which it never had before.

-- Marius Moore (mariusmoor@aol.com), September 08, 2003.