The Day Persnickety Saved Me

So. The time has come to sort out all these printed layouts that have been sitting on my WIPs desk for a few months, awaiting a home in an album. I usually sort these the night that they arrive in the mail, but this time, events happened (both catastrophic and devastating) that delayed my usual process. And then more real-life stuff happened that made it a hard job to tackle.

This was the order that contained all of the layouts I created when I was pregnant with my fourth baby. I was so thrilled, so excited. I documented it all. I made pre-made albums for its whole first year. I researched and documented its growth stages. I bought up big on pregnancy kits. And then our world came crashing down three months later. And I haven’t been able to look at these pages since.

To compound the problem, my 2-year-old daughter immersed more than half my order in spilt green cordial. For more than an hour. She spilt her drink cup onto my order pile, sitting neatly on the coffee table ready for sorting after dinner. And I didn’t realise until after dinner clean up and bedtime stories were done. So, they were sitting in sugary drink for a long time!

For some reason I must have made a comment about the spilt cordial on my facebook page that night. I received a very prompt reply from a Persnickety Prints representative telling me to just wash them in water and hang them out to dry. Promptly!

I did this, and was very grateful for the unsolicited advice from the “horse’s mouth”. But when I ran out of bench space to dry them off, I left the remainder for another time. I’m talking an order of about 180 12 x 12 prints!

Alas! When I checked the rest in the morning, the remainder were stuck together and ripping the front off the next image. So, I ripped a few faces off a few layouts, before dumping this job in the “too hard for now” file and leaving the sticky cluster for another few months.

Well, I came back to this job last night. Can’t tell you why, as I had a million other jobs to do on my list, but this seemed to be long overdue. So, I started ripping a few more faces off my pages, before I thought – “why not just immerse them in water again?” at least to get the sticky stuff pliable again.

So I did. I didn’t really have much to lose, as I’d figured I’d need to re-order these prints again anyway. But to my amazement, as I sloshed these 12 x 12 pages about in warm water, they started to become unstuck from each other! I couldn’t believe it!! So I got a bit excited and peeled a few apart prematurely – resulting in curled corners – but it actually worked!! I have hung out these others to dry. If I thought some would have a few water spots on them, I immersed them again and hung them out to dry again.

It’s working! I actually don’t think I’ll need to reorder any of them!

I know some have very peeled edges or corners – but I can live with that – as I think the heaviness of my albums will sort that out itself. I am glad this seems to have worked, as I just could not have binned some of these pages – no matter how mangled – because they held a lot of sentimental value to me. I just couldn’t throw my lost baby in the bin.

So. I am not affiliated with Persnickety Prints at all. But I am telling you, they really saved me this time. What was once damaged and unuseable, is now preserved and treasured.