Thrifty Art Thursday: Flattening Paper

Thrifty Art Thursday: Flattening Paper January 5, 2011
A while back I posted about how I had made some fox linocut prints, experimenting with pre-wetting the paper and it worked great!
Except for one problem.
They dried all wrinkled and gnarly, which was no good at all. I’ve had this wrinkle problem before, when paper got wet, or folded and I’ve tried ironing it, flattening it with books, and taping it to a board, but pressing it works far better than any of them.
Now I’ve seen beautiful little paper presses used for pressing paper that’s just been made, sometimes bought, sometimes homemade. One friend of mine used a car jack to press her paper. I didn’t have any of that around, so I improvised:

I used two plywood scraps I had sitting around, that were about the right size, and four clamps. These are the spring loaded kind, but i imagine that any strong and sturdy clamp would work to apply pressure. I re-wetted the paper with a spray bottle of water and layered it with half sheets of printer paper. Start with the printer paper on the first board, and then then layer the dampened paper you want to flatten, sandwiched between the dry printer paper pieces. Lay the other board on top and carefully clamp around the edges of the boards. Ignore for a few days or a week, depending on how humid your house is. It only took a couple of days in my dry winter house, but I imagine it would take longer in the wet spring or fall.

Unclamp, and Voila! Flattened paper! So now I can finally make my linocuts into postcards and mixed media works and send them off. Yay!


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