Tuesday, 18 March 2025
When I was a teenager, the high-school librarian taught me how to use the latest high-tech tool, which was later mass-marketed as "Elmer's Glue", to mend torn pages.
The method works better on torn paper, because you get a bit of overlap, but I used it to mend a false cut in a posterboard pattern yesterday, and it worked well.
I used a flat toothpick to dip a teeny amount of glue out of the bottle and smear it on the edges of the cut, then wiped off the excess glue.
I intended to put waxed paper on each side of the cut to keep the glue from sticking to things it shouldn't stick to, but I happened to notice the release paper from a sheet of sticky labels and tore that into two pieces. Being strong, it worked better.
Once everything was lined up, I put my drafting triangle on to to keep it flat, then put a bricked UPS battery on the triangle to keep it squished together.
This morning I peeled off the paper -- which, unlike waxed paper, just fell off -- and found it perfectly mended. There was a thin fin of excess glue off the edge, which I trimmed with my SuperSnips.
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We have a lot of Unintteruptable Power Supplies, so we have a collection of worn-out batteries. I put a stickly label that says "BRICK" on each one, and they come in handy any time I want something small and heavy. But I usually use books as pattern weights.
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I usually mend paper patterns with a very thin and cheap iron-on interfacing I found somewhere a long time ago.