Tuesday, February 8, 2011

What did I say about Melbourne?

We had our own deluge on Friday night! Mike and I were at the movies and after the film were directed out the back door of the Rivoli, the foyer was flooded. The rain had stopped but we saw the evidence all the way home, flooded shops and water racing down the road etc. Then we got home to find that the carpet in our study/studio was saturated, I quickly picked up a couple of boxes of my artist books then started to assess the damage. Luckily most of my papers and books were either in plastic boxes or off the floor. However I lost some book board and maybe a Japanese book I use mostly for collage but also as an example of Oriental Binding in my bookbinding classes. Three small oriental bindings also got saturated. 
Mike and a friend pulled up the carpet on Sunday and here it is with the underlay drying outside on my very useful trampoline. The other picture shows all the towels we used in mopping up the wet carpet:-every towel in the house was put to work. 















I used up all the paper towel and serviettes in the house to dry off the pages then went through again with toilet paper. I am hoping these books don't go mouldy, I found some Chinese brush paintings in them that I quite like, I used them to work through a series of exercises.


2 comments:

Carol said...

Gail, can you stand the books up and fan the pages out a bit? That will just let the air get to them more easily for drying. Though by now I hope they're dry and that there was little or no damage. If anything is still damp maybe a fan would also help. Reading your post makes me wonder about how my studio would cope if it flooded. And these days, we can't be sure of what will happen, can we?

Papergail said...

Thanks Carol,
Those books are OK now though I've had to throw out some others that I lifted off the floor then forgot about, very silly really! Some of the things are not replaceable either, like the keepsakes from IAPMA Congresses from 2000 and 2009. Just goes to show they shouldn't have been on the floor in the first place.