You’d think this would be a simple thing to do, but invariably it isn’t. There are plenty of tips out there, but most of them gloss over a few details. Just to sum up (because I have no experimented with a variety of drying methods), I’d recommend the following:
- Soak the stamps for as long as it takes. A lot of faqs say that this should only take about ten or so minutes. They’re naive. The glue used to adhere a stamp to paper varies from country to country. I have Czech stamps from the 80’s that separate in under ten minutes. I also have some Indian stamps that took almost an hour to finally separate. Time varies, don’t plan your day around this part.
- Drying methods; seems everyone borrowed from the same crib sheet on this, and its wrong (and I have the damaged/ruined stamps to prove it). Don’t use a paper towel to dry your stamps on, whatever you do. If you’re like me, you aren’t doing this on a proper schedule, and it may be over a day before you can get back to them. If that’s the case, you run the likely risk that your stamps have now adhered to the paper towel, making them impossible to recover. Instead, I highly recommend using a folded sheet of wax paper, with the stamp in the middle, and then folding a paper towel around that (to draw out the excess water), and placing all of this under some flat weights, like a stack of books. There’s a little bit of transference still, but its mostly in the form of a little clear wax, which helps stiffen the stamp anyway.
- Change water between batches. Trust me.
- And the last thing they all seem to forget – have fun 🙂