I got a lot of great suggestions from friends on how to tackle the issue I faced last week with the fragile catalog pages crumbling. I forget sometimes that I’m not the only person who does what I do. I also forget sometimes that it’s ok to ask for help or ideas if I get stuck. I’m the type of person that likes to figure things out for myself and I actually enjoy problem solving, so asking for help doesn’t always come naturally for me. I want to thank everyone who gave me such great suggestions.

Patricia Dunsman suggested laminating the pieces, Paula Roland suggested I try using silk gampi, a very strong but tissue thin Japanese paper. This sounded like a great idea (one of those dohs). So I quickly got online with Paper Connection (a wonderful paper store if you are not familiar with them) and ordered a few sheets. They arrived quickly (and wonderfully packaged by the way) and I got to work doing some tests on some of the wrecked pieces. It seemed to work well, the damaged pieces were seemingly ‘healed’ and made much stronger and more flexible.  Most importantly they no longer cracked and crumbled when bent.  I then went about cutting and dipping some additional strips of catalog pages to replace the wrecked pieces.

Here is the laminating process I followed. I cut strips of the gampi slightly larger than the catalog pieces (there is a completed strip on top):

I sandwiched a catalog piece between two pieces of the gampi and placed it onto my Paula Roland Hot Box on which I had melted a bit of encaustic medium.

The medium quickly melted through the first layer of gampi, up through the catalog piece that had previously been dipped in wax, melting that, and incorporating the piece of gampi on top. Almost instantly the 3 pieces of paper were sealed together and the 2 sheets of gampi were transparent. Where there were bubbles I used the back of one of my silicone shaping tools to smooth them out. I then used a dental tool to carefully flip the set over and check for bubbles.

Now for the depressing part, carefully removing the rest of the damaged trim pieces from the quilt. Always feels like going backwards, but this is the part of the work that teaches me patience.  Ohm.