Up to now, the coils have stayed on one plane, fabricated and dried on a flat table top. Given abaca’s natural flex, some of the planar flatness is dispelled when used in a composition, but still, it’s a bent plane rather a truly 3d “line drawing.” Recently, we had some bright white rope piled on a work table. We wondered how we might make a coil act more rope-like and loop about in space.

This post is inconclusive, but we’re stuck on the topic and want to attract some help.

We want to learn how to use wax on handmade paper (see specifically what we want to learn below.)

We can’t find anything useful on the web. (one eye roller: put some wax paper from the grocery store or your morning donut bag into a blender and then add to your vat of pulp.) There’s plenty on how to make your paper look like it’s encased in wax.

We’re publishing this post about what little we’ve learned, hoping that a like minded papermaker or craftsman (woodworkers’ wax polish recipes have provided the most helpful leads) might find it and offer some insight.

Carving grooves in pink insulation foam board to cast coil designs seems clever, but it is not practical. You would have to gouge a busy road map of grooves to get much flexibility of design. Or go through a lot of pink foam.

Our next idea is to use strips of aluminum flashing held in position with kebab skewers. We liked our sample, but found it awkward to position the flashing walls and plunge them into place at the same time. Much easier to position the fences just so and then skewer them into place.

We rolled some 96” x 4” strips of 5 hour double-couched abaca into coils. Then we moved them around to find a design we liked. We traced the design onto the pink insulation foam in pencil. We used a cutter and carving tools to gouge out a groove to serve as a mold for the coils. With the help of some T-pins at the end, the coils shrank taut and stiffly structural. Even with a fan blowing across the surface, it took 12 days to dry - about 2x as long as expected.