Here are some pictures of me taking placenta prints. It’s something I love to do and children especially have a good time. My love of it came after a client I birthed with did a print and scanned it into her computer and changed it to green and brown. It was exactly the tree of life. Before this I hadn’t really given it much thought. I have developed my technique over the past few years and children and myself have come up some magnificent efforts.
I usually take prints of each side. The variables are the amount of blood around the placenta and the absorbency of the paper.
As you can see no gloves. Thought I’d mention it since it was a comment on my third stage article.
I’m always pleased with the result. They are beautiful and individual print of the baby’s journey to birth.
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Thank-you so much for this post! What powerful art. We were planning to defrost our daughter’s placenta to plant on her first birthday, but I think it would be more us to make a painting rather than garden
Thanks for the inspiration.
Hi Lisa,
We are going to do a print of our daughter’s placenta on the first anniversary of her lotus birth, and I was wondering what you do with the placenta once you’ve finished painting? I don’t imagine a paint covered placenta would be very good for planting…but I don’t know of any other way to farewell the placenta from the freezer.
Thanks in advance.
You could wash it after painting and before planting. Mainly I’ve found that when defrosted you can just add water and that provides some juice. I’ve also used tumeric that’s just a spice so should be fine to bury. If you had a lotus was the placenta much decreased in size before freezing?
Thanks! I suppose I’ll just have to work fast to make sure the paint doesn’t dry onto the placenta before we finish.
Ours did not decrease very much, it is smaller, but not drastically smaller. It was also still a little juicy when it detached so I do expect to get some blood prints as well before using paint (I’m thinking of doing coloured ones on canvas.