Today was the day when all washing dreams came true, after breakfast and strawberry jam and a short taxi ride we arrived at the laundrette. A friendly assistant helped us load 5 loads (!) into the machines and we watched them clean all of the last two weeks away. It was great, but took a long time and we missed a morning at the museum. But if we had not done our washing we would not have any clean clothes to wear for the rest of the week! Of course we checked with Teodora beforehand, who was absolutely fine with us doing this as I am not sure the museum would have not wanted the two English interns to turn up in dirty clothes for a week!
When we arrived back at the museum, everyone in the department was so very kind and all offered separately to wash our clothes in their machines for us, we can not thank them enough for their kindness and we will probably be taking them up on their kind offers.
Once all of the washing excitement had died down, we set back to work on our main projects.
Unfortunately though when I took off the cover of my sculpture it revealed this…
MOULD!
I think this has happened because of the water used within the organic agar, growing mould within the humid environment of Brazil and the labs, even though they are more controlled there is still a high humidity level that meant the water could evaporate properly.
So I tried a few things to remove the mould, a vacuum and soft toothbrush to remove the fluffy mould then a alcohol ethyl and water solution sprayed on and again brushed. This unfortunately did not remove the black mould on the surface, so tomorrow I am thinking of trying another layer of agar but using a solvent within it, one that Tatiana had recommended before to remove dirt and hopefully help to stop the mould growth.
Today I have also prepared the bamboo armatures to attach the hand with, by coating them in a layer of Paraloid B72 and Xilol 1:5 (or Xylene in English) to seal the sticks before they are put into the sculpture.
Grace today has carried on removing the retouching and discovered that there was more paint retouching than she originally thought, because of this she has stopped removing the existing retouches as they are not actually harming the painting. If she did remove all of the previous restoration, she would have to obviously retouch the missing areas, but she would not have enough original information to be able to recreate the image as it currently is.
Another task Grace completed today was to remove a fragment of newspaper from the middle top of the painting. She used a scalpel to slowly peel it away from the surface.
For supper this evening we had mushroom pasta, that was very tasty. The hostel is quite tonight just us, one girl and Emanuel our French friend.
It is also pouring down with rain and thundering, it is like we have never left England!
Goodnight Brazil, Good morning England, I hope everyone at home has a superb Tuesday.
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