Reviving Heidi

Drying

Now that the pages have been washed, they need to be dried. The first step was to hang the sheets, once the sheets were almost dry (or completely dry) I put them in order and pressed them flat. First I tried pressing them flat with a sheet of newsprint on either side, changing the news print every so often. This proved time consuming and irritating as the sheets were still so wet they were cockling. So I left the sheets to air dry longer and put them into the press when they were almost completely dry but still cool to the touch. I pressed one batch overnight and now have it out beside me to get rid of a little more moisture before pressing them again. Not a great methodology, but it is what I have room for in my apartment.

While hanging up the sheets to dry I checked for old glue and peeled it off with my finger nail if it was willing to come off. The white strip is a layer of old glue. It was on maybe 5-10% of the pages. This is one of the thickest strips left on the page. Most were only small amounts right along the edge.

Step one of the hanging process was done in the bathroom with the exhaust fan on. As I ran out of room I moved the hangers into different rooms in the apartment. Each of the sheets was clothes pinned to the hanger. A slip of acid-free paper went between the clothes hanger and the sheet. This was to try and prevent the clothes pin from putting a dent in the sheet of paper. I'm pretty sure this suggestion is from The Complete Book of Papermaking, which I covet, but can't get through the Toronto Public Library system. I look through it whenever I'm finer bookstores. In any case...a few of my Heidi sheets still got dents, but most were ok. Note: these are wire hangers so the sheets are hanging lower than the hanger, not on them. The pages on the left are nearly dry. The page on the right is still wet. The pages get lighter as they dry.

Some pages have little "ridges" of colour along the spine edge. I'm not sure what these are from, but you can see them in this picture. As far as I can tell these are not intentional ridges from either a water mark or laid paper. They were only on a few pages and always on the inside.

Although the sheets got lighter as they dried, they did not clean up as much as I thought they would. You saw the amount of dirt that came out of these pages! I do think the pages look better now they've been washed, but for some reason I was expecting a much bigger difference.

Cleaned sheet on the left, dirty one on the right. On the one hand it's not a great picture, on the other hand there really isn't a big difference. Cheating and comparing washed inside edge vs. dirty outside edge. You can see the sheet on the left isn't quite as yellow. Close-up comparison of edges:

When pages are printed using a letterpress you can sometimes feel a ridge where the letter was pressed into the sheet. (Think of the back of a typewriter page.) These pages don't have those ridges, which means I can use "full force" when pressing the sheets flat.

First I put the pages in order and tapped the stack to get it all lined up. Next I put the stack of pages in my nipping press (which my mom gave me) and pressed. I left the first batch overnight and then took it out to replace the damp sheets. I'll repeat this process until the pages are dry and flat.

Pages in the nipping press

Stay tuned for more Heidi fun! The next step will be to bind the pages. I'll have to do some variation of a perfect bind (glue up the spine), but I haven't decided if I want to sink cords into the back or not.