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Save Your Letters: Flattening and Displaying Letters previous 10 of 12 next

Flattening and displaying letters
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Now that we've humidified our letter, we notice we've gotten most of the harsh creases out. Now we have a few more kinks we want to get out -- and flatten it a little more. I'm going to put it down on some archival blotter paper. Put your paper down -- I just like to put it maybe upside down there, gently. On this initial one I'll just put another piece of archival tissue on there and then put several pieces of blotter on top. You can let them sit there for a minute. Give it a little time to gently settle down and flatten. And then you can use a weight and put it down there, gently. For a weight you can use a brick. Just get a brick, cover the brick with paper or cover it with fabric but they are a wonderful weight.

The ultimate outcome we have here... This is a different letter but still what we are looking for -- very nicely flattened, minimal damage at all done to the side of it and store in an archival folder. For this one, what I've done is put the cover next to it. I put it in -- corner-mounted it onto the folder and I've encapsulated it in mylar. Once again, "encapsulate it" means I can remove it from it. And what I've put behind it is just a little bit of buffered tissue to prevent it from any kind of acidic damage. Glues tend to be more susceptible to it. And the reason I put it in this polyester film is to protect the marks from ever transferring -- the ink marks here from ever transferring onto the letter itself. So I just put this back in and I've got a complete package here for display or for looking at later.

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