Strawberry Preservation Workshop

As an intern at the ThinkTank, I'm involved in a bunch of workshops, either as a participant or as an instructor. Workshops in which all of the CCI interns are participants (these workshops are put on for our edification, actually) are pretty common, so it is not unusual to get a series of emails with titles like, "Mannequin Making Workshop," or "Disaster Workshop," or "Packing Workshop."

So when I got one with the title, "Strawberry Preservation Workshop," it took me a moment to realize that the word strawberry was included, and that that wasn't very conservation-y.

Strawberries are very much in season right now, and the vendors down at the Byward Market are selling them practically by the bushel-load. As part of encouraging everyone to buy fresh, buy local, the Sandy Hill Community Centre offered a two-hour workshop on Strawberry Preservation. Also known as making strawberry jam.

So we all attended the workshop and learned how to make strawberry jam. Then, a week later, it was time to put our book-learnin' to the test. We had originally planned to do it old-school-style, picking our strawberries ourselves, but the weather has been really uncooperative. Meeting at Marie-Catherine's house - we mashed and boiled sixteen cups of fresh Canada strawberries into jam. Actually, a whole lot of boiling happened. We boiled the strawberries, the jars, the lids, the jam in the jars, everything.

My portion of the jam. There was a great deal of high-fives in the kitchen after the jam thickened and the lids were sucked down into place, making a distinctive popping sound.

Success!

The St. Catharines Standard: Some TLC for Standard Photo Negatives

Don Fraser, Standard Staff (with slight modifications by me) link here.

The negatives are priceless vignettes of local life from the late 1950s.  One standout shows then Canadian prime minister Lester B. Pearson grinning at a St. Catharines Legion hall reception.  It's also one of the more damaged of the 600,000 negatives in The Standard collection donated to the St. Catharines Museum in 2007.  The image is crinkly and bubbly, the features of Pearson barely recognizable.

On Thursday, the Canadian Conservation Institute began working on about 200 of the images in need of major restoration.  For the federal government institute, it's the first Ontario site visit doing this kind of work on photo collections.

"This particular batch is an important part of The Standard collection for the museum," said Supervisor Greg, a conservator for the institute. "And it's starting to deteriorate in a significant way.  "It could have been storage conditions, it could have been the manufacturer or a combination of issues. But they're in serious need of work."

Inside a museum basement room, Supervisor Greg and Intern Jessica showed how it's done: a delicate process of separating the negative's silver gelatin emulsion (or image layer) from a deteriorating plastic film base.  After the negative is put in water, a solvent bath dissolves the glue holding the layers together and the gelatin emulsion sloughs off.  That remaining image layer is then scanned, put in a special archival sleeve and stored.  One person can do about three or four images in an hour.  With the help of a $4,000 Niagara Community Foundation grant, private conservator Dorothy McC- will also be helping with the negative treatments.

Museum curator Arden P- described this work as "critical."  "We don't have the financial resources and expertise to be able to do all this in-house," P- said. "These things are dying as we speak and it's so critical to get them treated and scanned.  "It's a long, involved process that can only be done by hand."  The museum and its volunteers have already completed two years of what is anticipated to be a 25-year project of preserving and archiving The Standard's photo collection.

And the accompanying photograph.  This was really nerve-wracking: photographer and reporter and me doing this (which is, like all things, way more difficult that it sounds).  And, to top it off, the negative reacted totally differently than the one Supervisor Greg did the day before.  And in a totally unexpected way too.  But it was okay.

Paper: Helping Hye-Sung

As part of her treatment project at the ThinkTank, Hye-Sung needed to turn a big sheet of Japanese paper a kind of orangey-brown.  The color needed to be even across the paper.  Using smaller pieces of paper wasn't going to work - it needed to be one big piece, for reasons I won't go in to.  We ended up working through ideas on how to tone the paper together, and because the paper was so big, she needed my assistance to actually carry out the process.

Hye-Sung standing next to the paper that we needed to color.  For reference, Hye-Sung is about 5'1" - she attempted to calculate her height in feet/inches (she knows her height in centimeters) and then told me that she was ten feet tall.  I laughed and told her that the panorama was twelve feet long.  She yelped in surprise and admitted that she may have made a mistake in her calculations.

Hye-Sung mixed up this huge tub of watered-down acrylic paint, in which we would briefly dip the paper.  Easier said than done: Japanese paper is very strong but very thin.  The tray wasn't big enough to float the paper in, so she held one end, I held the other, and we sort of 'rolled' the paper through the paint.

We rigged this drying device so that the paper would hang to dry.  If we dried the paper flat against a table, the watery paint would pool and cause streaks of color.

Victorious!