Warped and Wrinkled Paper Curse

After starting using Carboxy Methylcellulose (CMC), I began to wonder if my setup wasn't right. The problem was my double tissue would always peel itself when drying. There will be high pitched popping sound from the paper every now and then. Finally it would be completely off the surface. Whereas on every tutorial I saw, the paper will still stick to the surface and we have to peel it off.

The bad part is the paper will be warped; it's not flat.

It is difficult to fold a straight line on paper like this. Imagine precreasing a grid or locating references when your fold can be bent due to the paper's bump.

I have theory on why the warp happened. Before going to that, it is important to know that:

1. When a paper is wet, it expands.
2. When it dries, it will return to the original size. However it will keep its shape when it is wet, meaning that if it is bent when wet, it will retain that bend when dried. 

When my paper dried partially, that region will shrink. This created difference in area between the still wet part and dried part. The difference caused tiny bend that lift the paper up. Once the bent region dried, the area next to it to have difference in area, causing another bend there. This phenomena will keep on happening until the paper is completely dry. I observed that the paper bending will happen from the borders, moving towards  center during drying from all directions until the paper get completely peeled by itself.

To explain the warping, I think it happened when the bent region is drying. Since the paper is slightly lifted up, it will dry faster than the other region that is still sticking to the surface. Remember that paper retain its fiber position when dried, meaning that the bend will still be there when dried. This irregular bend from all directions will cause the paper to be wavy and warped. Or shall I say, cursed.

I asked the people in Origami Dan server, and people suggested me to apply more MC (or CMC in my case). The thought process was, maybe my paper didn't stick to the surface strong enough. So I tried to do that, but no success.

The other suggestion is to apply CMC on the last layer. So it is CMC, paper, CMC, paper, and finally CMC again. This didn't work well either.

I thought maybe it's because I applied the CMC unevenly. The central part tend to be wetter than the border. So I put crazy load of CMC in the border, but still the paper was cursed.

 

Next thing I did is to vary the CMC to water ratio. I made various composite with CMC to water ratio between 1 : 36 and 1 : 12. The thickest have consistency of honey, while the thinnest is like espresso. In the end, nothing worked.

I started to suspect my equipment is the problem, but people who used acrylic glass for surface never had my problem.

Then I turned my attention to the CMC. Maybe it is bad? I actually bought it from a certain famous shop, so it is unlikely to be bad. In any case, trying other brand won't hurt. So I used "Lineco" brand, which is actually MC instead of CMC.

To my surprise, it worked perfectly in the first trial!! 

There was no peeling at all. I would conclude that the CMC I bought earlier is inferior to the Lineco MC. 

I also need to think what would I do with the cursed papers that was produced during my experiments. Cutting it into smaller sheets reduced the effect of warps. So that's what I did, and used it for practice folds.

That is remora by @arbitrarynature (Twitter)

Warping problem is gone. I still have a less severe problem, which is wrinkle. Even though using a roller worked nicely, there will be a vertical wrinkle on my paper. Some people like wrinkle, but in most cases I don't.

I am guessing it happened because using roller applied tension parallel to the direction of unrolling, but not perpendicular. This made the paper expansion on the perpendicular direction untended. There is not enough space to expand because the paper around it has stuck to the surface, and the only way is to expand upwards; producing wrinkle.

I watched back some of the Youtube videos on making double tissue, and found something I missed. On Plant's tutorial, he mentioned that the roller should be held slightly above the surface, then use dry brush to swipe the paper perpendicular to the unrolling direction. That is something I need to do, because that strategy will apply tension to the paper on all 4 directions right when it is becoming wet.

Since I can't hold the roller with one hand steadily while other hand do the brushing, I made a rail for the roller using cardboard. This rail is slightly above the surface, and now I can just unroll the roller in this rail while my other hand do the brushing.

It worked perfectly, for the first time I was able to successfully make wrinkle-less paper.

I celebrated that discovery by keep making treated tissues non-stop, even though I don't know what will I fold. By the way, Lineco MC is quite expensive for its size. So I tried another brand called TALAS which sells MC in large batch. I have tried the MC and it gave me the same experience as Lineco. Now I have more MC than salt in the household that will last for years, just for 15$.

That's about it on my experience with cursed papers. Hopefully this help someone else with similar issue.

UPDATE 2021-12-31

Here's another trick to further prevent wrinkle on double tissue.

Some tissues are very absorbent and greatly swell when wet. This swelling caused wrinkle even if we're being very careful when MC-ing the paper to surface.

To reduce the swelling effect, first use mist sprayer (can be found in Daisho or accessory shop) to spray water to the untreated tissues. Don't let it wet, just make it damp. Wait for 1-2 minutes until the tiny water droplets are fully absorbed. At this point the paper should swell. Then proceed in making double tissue as usual. Now that the paper had became swole, it won't expand much further upon contact with MC.

Sprayer

This isn't new technique since I realized that LaFosse did the same thing before treating paper.

On the image, the double tissue on the left is made without using this technique while the one on right is. You can see the wrinkles on left one.