cease your clamouring

Hey hey oh hey look it is me here blogging again. Weird!  I guess I only missed 2 days but I felt like quite the truant those 2 nights, going to sleep without plugging in my camera and whatnot! I know I had good excuses both nights... I can't remember what Wednesday's excuse was, but Thursday was our class party so the shindiggery kept us all out late.  Here are some pictures from the past couple missed days.

Oh so on Wednesday I went in to the studio about an hour early to meet with Renate and try a bleaching technique on my blue ink book and see what happened.  We did it early because a)we were using a chlorine-based chemical nonsense so it smelled and was maybe mildly dangerous and b)she doesn't really want to be teaching us bleaching techniques because it's a pretty extreme treatment and she was only doing it now because she couldn't stand to let that blue ink go and not at least TRY another way of getting it out.  I thought that was nice :)  It's cool when people you respect sort of geek out about the same things as you. So, we treated just one page of the blue ink book in a bath with like .5% chlorine something or other and the result is the top page below, with the ethanol wash below it, and on the bottom the original coloring:

Pretty wild, right?  I mean, obviously it is not all gone, but it's definitely a lot lighter, and also a weird greeny sort of color.  It's cool all the different things that you can make happen to paper when you mess with it the right way! She said that the chemical we were using wasn't really the right thing to deal with ink, but it is all they had at the school.  I'm thinking I will save this book unbound and if ever I take a class on bleaching techniques, I will have something perfect to test all the different chemicals on :)

Here is that delightful fire damage book that I finished dry cleaning on Thursday.  I thought to take a before and after picture of this one page that had some obvious smokey business on it so that you can see the difference that happens:

before:

 

after:

 So, obviously still really marked up and dirty, but a lot of the really dark dark smoke staining is gone! I feel like I really bonded with this book as I dry cleaned it.  Today I went back and started the looooooooong process of mending and guarding, which I am thinking will last me well through the winter, but it's kind of nice and okay to think of just always coming back to it and doing all the little fixes one page at a time. In a way, I think that is what makes me not a very good conservator, or at least a not very professional one--I come at all of this as a person who loves books originally at least because of their content--I think that makes it a much more emotional connection than if I came from say a primarily artistic or historical or technical background.  I wanna make friends with all the nice books and then fix them because I love them.  Which I obviously think is great, but I think it comes across as a bit quaint to the people who do this because it is their bread and butter.  I dunno.  I'm just saying words.

 This is a picture of Emilie looking furtive.

 So we were learning about pulp filling, which is when you basically make new paper to fill in for big losses in your original paper.  It's pretty amazing--you just squirt the new paper fibers right on there to the old paper and it all just sort of hangs together and is fabulous.  So, I didn't have any papers that needed pulp filling, but I've always been really interested in paper making and wanted to try it but never had the materials and whatnot, so yesterday afternoon I sort of dropped all the proper work I was doing and just played with paper pulp instead.

The stuff they were using for actual repairs was like the lighter colored circle in the center--pretty regular paper color and fiber and everything.  Since I was in full play time mode I blended up my own pulp using this nasty brown cardboard that we'd been using for something else. So, I have a lot of little samples of brown paper now.  Everyone was sort of grossed out--it smelled nasty (we'd been boiling the old cardboard to then take the dirty water, boil THAT down, and have a nasty molasses-y gunk that you then use like a watercolor to paint over your repair paper so it matches the tone of the original paper you are repairing) and you know, brown paper pulp....it's not the most delicate looking of things.  But I had a lot of fun playing around and experimenting with it.

Well gang, class is OVER now and I have to say, I am so glad!  3 weeks is really the threshold--I am totally ready to go back to real life!  Tomorrow Becca and Kyle are driving down from Springville to pick me up and drive me back--hopefully the snow storm a-comin' isn't too treacherous and doesn't strand us in the wilderness.  Then I get to spend all next week with them and RUBY and have funtimes Thanksgivingtimes, Becca's house style.  Which is to say, awesome-style.  The times, they will be good.