Kregel Windmill Factory Museum: Update on Preservation of Blueprints

I was just recently trying to think of a new section for the quarterly newsletter that is coming up here real soon and I realized that a while back I had put a section in the newsletter about Jeremy and I working on preserving some of the old blueprints from the drafting table in the factory, but I had never done a follow up. So, that's what I'm doing.

Over the last few months we have been slowly working on removing and restoring some of the cyanotype blueprints from Robert Kregel's drafting table over in the museum. There were quite a few of them just rolled up and still sitting in the drawers. Unfortunately that's not really the proper way to store 80 to 100 year old blueprints. So the plan has been to take them out of there, humidify them, flatten them, and store them properly, with some of the doubles and scrap pieces of paper left in for looks.We have had to be quite careful with some of these as the process that was used to make them many years ago doesn't create an image that is totally permanent and it can be degraded by using the wrong kind of storage paper and other things like that. If you have a minute or two pop over to the Wikipedia page on "cyanotypes", it's quite interesting, but I digress.

Now that several of these blueprints have gone through our flattening process we have been able to take some pictures of them to show on here. Here are just a few of the blueprints. I will post more as we get them photographed. Enjoy