Sizing time!

For the past week and a half, work on the flower show has had to share time with sizing the paper that I’ll be printing on in the coming year. It’s a multi-day process that involves soaking sheets of paper in a vat of warmed gelatin and then hanging to dry each day. I wrote about sizing in some detail last year in a post. Like the gum process, sizing is a slow, day-by-day, layer-by-layer process.

This year I’m sizing 96 sheets in all. I began more than a week ago by pre-shrinking each batch in hot water -- I want to make sure the paper is as small as it’s ever going to be before I start printing with it later in the year. 

Then for the next 6 days I coated 48 sheets of paper per day, three times each, in a large metal pan filled with 8 gallons of heated gelatin to soak the paper. Each batch is then hung to dry in my screen porch.

The final step is hardening the surface of the multi-layered gelatin paper. There are a couple of options out there for hardening. I use formaldehyde. 

As of yesterday afternoon, the annual ritual of paper sizing has come to an end for another year!