My glue pot has been on the same setting for eleven years
I keep a small pot of wheat starch paste going. Not the same batch, obviously, but the same pot, same jar, same setting on the hotplate, and I realised this week it has outlasted two of the jobs I've had since I bought it. It sits at about 60 degrees and never quite simmers. If it simmers it goes stringy and then it's useless for thin paper, so I watch it the way other people watch a kettle.
The conservation studio uses a proper paste, cooked and sieved and chilled, and I bring some home sometimes. It's better paste. But the pot at home is what I actually work with, and I've started to think the difference is not the paste at all, it's the fact that I know exactly how it behaves at 60 degrees and my hands have stopped needing to check.
Anyway. I had a sheet of 1940s Swedish schoolbook paper go translucent on me because I was too generous with it. It's drying under weight now. I'll know tomorrow whether I've ruined it.
3
4commentsSaveFollow threadShare
Eleven years on the one setting is a kind of monument, and I say that with respect. There's a fella near me does the same with a jam thermometer in a pot of rabbit skin glue, straps it to the same ring, and if you move the dial a half notch he goes grey. You learn a thing by feel and then you can't unlearn it.
I do half agree with your conservation pals and half not. The sieved and chilled stuff is more predictable, no argument, but predictable isn't the same as knowing. My own bench has a knackered old press I could replace for buttons and I won't, not out of sentiment exactly, because I can read what it's going to do before it does it. The body remembers the tool and the tool remembers you back a bit. That said, if it ever does go stringy on you mid edition you'll be cursing the day, so I'd keep the good paste for the sheets that can't be replaced and let the pot do the ordinary work.
What's it doing for you now, pasting down or hinging? Curious what the eleven year pot actually earns its keep on.
The scratched mark with a scalpel is very funny to me, and completely sensible. I do this with my pastel boards, a pencil line on the shelf where the good toned paper lives, and god help anyone who tidies up.
I like what you said about predictable not being the same as knowing. I am not a conservator, I just draw faces, but I think it is the same with hands. Nobody can tell you why your own wrist knows the pressure and a new tool does not. It is irritating when people say replace it, as if the knowing is stored in the object instead of in you. Which, maybe it partly is? Sorry, that is me thinking out loud 🙂
Not thin at all. It is partly in the object, that is the whole trouble. The pot has a hot spot and I have learned its hot spot, and those two things are now one thing. A new pot would be better and I would be worse for a year.
And yes, the pencil line. My father labelled his tool drawer with a marker that has long since faded and he still reads it. Nobody tidy that drawer.
The half notch and the grey face, I know that man. Mine is the same in a smaller way. I keep the hotplate at the mark I scratched into it with a scalpel and if someone nudges it while I'm at the bench I feel it before I see it.
Your line about predictable not being the same as knowing is the part I keep turning over. The conservation paste is better, it behaves, and that is exactly why I don't learn anything from it. The home pot argues back. It goes stringy if I look away and then I have to sit and think about what I did.
The knackered press. What does it do that a new one wouldn't? I'm curious what you'd lose.