Marbling mistake

[Richard Norman]

I used to run a bookbinding workshop, we also used to marble paper.

Marbling calls for, amongst other things, large amounts of rendered down seaweed with which we make our size.

Our marbling studio was at one end of our building, the "kitchen" as we called it, where we rendered the seaweed was at the other end.

Normally I had to carry 25kg buckets of size from one end of the building to the other.

I had a brainwave, I would run a hosepipe from the kitchen to the studio, in the event I had to use 2 hosepipes joined together, we ran the hosepipe through our loft space.

I turned the pump on and ran the hose into a 50 gallon container, I checked it once and all was going smoothly.

I got called away for some reason, and when I checked again only a small amount of size was in the container.

What had happened was the hosepipe join had given way and the best part of 50 gallons of seaweed size got pumped into the loft space.

It dribbled through the cracks in our wooden ceiling and oozed down the walls.

But worse of all it was a very hot summer and the size being organic went off very quickly and started to smell really bad.

It took a whole weekend clearing up the loft, the smell lingered for much longer, we burned incense to mask it.

A truly dreadful blunder.

Richard

 

[George_N]

Hi Richard, that is a good story to open your account on the forum, welcome aboard. The spam trap has caught your images and you should be able to post pictures after you have made a few more posts. Thankfully though, you won't ever be able to post the smell of rancid seaweed size :lol:

 

[DaveL]

Hi Richard,

Welcome to the forum.

Sounds like a bit of a nightmare, just the thought of boiled seaweed dripping though the ceiling is enough for me not to want to visit the workshop for some time. :shock:

Your links have been caught by our spam trap, this will stop once you have a few more posts to your name.
Here they are:

Devoted to the obscure and esoteric in bookbinding.

For gilding and antique finishes to gold leaf.

Some very impressive work shown there, the marbling looks good, so boiling the seaweed was worthwhile. 8)