Day 3: How long do you think until I lose track of the day number? I bet I make it til next Tuesday.

This is how we rigged by pages for drying--so they are hang drying instead of laying flat on felt or blotter under weight.  So far it works well when there is a fan circulating air all up in its business, but maybe not so great otherwise. 

This is the big counter space.  it is handy for when you are doing stuff with water or spraying nonsense that you don't want to get all over your workspace.

This is what the sink business looks like.  The chair in the foreground is mine.  Yay!

This is the little station where we mix up things with cool sounding names, like methyl cellulose and magnesium bicarbonate and ....gelatin.  Woo!  Those are things that we use either as adhesives, sizing (stuff you soak into the paper to stabilize it) or as deacidifier, (another thing you soak paper in to bring up the pH level ...a lot of my time is spent pretending I understand about acids and alkalies and pH levels and other such nonsense)

This is a comparison to show how good and clean my paper got with all that washing yesterday!  The top paper is obviously what was washed, while the bottom is actually a page from the other volume of the novel I'm fixing up.  I spent extra time in the lab tonight prepping that second volume for washing--I took off the cover, scraped the junk off the spine, and pulled the pages apart.  I'm hoping that tomorrow night I can get the lab all to myself and do hard core washing and thereby be closer to completing the set.

So the big development today was learning how to mend tears in the paper.  We are starting with holes and rips along the fold line; tomorrow we are learning about tears and losses in the rest of the paper.  It's really pretty simple--  you tear off a piece of this special soft Asian paper (the tearing is important because you don't want a sharp, straight edge, you want there to be stray fibers and things that can blend into the original paper) and pretty much just glue it down over the hole or tear.  Then you run over it with a tacking iron to set the paste and that's kind of it!  The only reason it takes forever is that you need to fill in all of the original sewing holes, because we are going to sew it a different way (I don't really get the deal with that, but next week when we do sewing I assume it'll all come together) so you're tearing and gluing and ironing at least 9 holes per page (my book was sewn RIDICULOUSLY so there are way more holes than I even understand having), PLUS filling in all the random rips and things as shown above.  So, it is simple but time consuming, which actually makes it one of my favorite things in the world.  You just get in the zone and kind of space out as you do it and it's just cool.  What is even COOLER is what is in the picture after this next one.

this is a picture of me using the tacking iron.  riveting stuff, i know.

Ok so THIS is what I think is really great.  This isn't a great picture, because it's kind of a 'during' picture rather than showing the finished product--anyway, it is just really miraculous and wonderful to repair a big hole in paper like there was at the bottom of this page.  Most of the time we were just doing little sewing holes or whatever which was great and all, but pretty much invisible and I don't understand the point yet so it was kind of not as great.  But things like THIS I think are SO COOL because it's immediately apparent that because of what I've done, these papers are going to stay together and be strong and someone will actually be able to READ and ENJOY this book, and not worry about it crumbling away.  SO SATISFYING!  Tomorrow I'll take more pictures of parts like this after the repair paper is trimmed down and it's all folded in a signature and looks legit.  I thought it was going to be a bummer repairing all the paper, since my book more than anyone elses was pretty torn up and needs a LOT of repairs, but now I'm kind of pumped because I just think it's fun!