Saturday, April 27, 2013

Paper Restoration Project

I finished this a few weeks ago.  A family friend had an old scotch-taped up marriage certificate belonging to her mother. 

This is it's starting stage.  It was missing a few chunks, and covered in scotch-tape.

First, I carefully removed all the scotch-tape from the front and back.  For parts on the front, to avoid peeling up text, I used ethanol to ease the adhesive off slowly.

The piece disassembled. At this stage, I cleaned and de-acidified all the parts.  

The finished piece: I salvaged as much as I could, and mounted it on matching kozo paper.  The large pieces were patched in the front and back to match the density of the original paper. I decided not to continue the border, and did as little touch-up as possible on the actual design.