The Deckled Edge

A deckled edges celebrates paper and inform us that this paper is going to be lovely to handle and great to work on. The image on the left is a torn edge to suggest deckling and the image on the right is a real deckled edge.

When you make paper you pick up a sheet of pulp on a mesh. It is then laid onto a felt and has an even thickness of about 4-6mm. Pressure is applied - boards, rollers, or presses; and some of the pulp oozes out beyond the edge. This is the deckle.

Tearing the paper beautifully is quite easy, but requires a little care.You need to tear a strip off the edge with the painting face-down. So to mark the corners what I do is to have crop lines like they do in printing. If the crop lines met at the corner, you would end up with a tiny black spot in each corner once the work was trimmed. So we need to work out where the corner would be. After many years of drawing faint pencil lines, then piercing; I thought of this new way - yesterday! Take a small square of card and lay it along the crop marks then mark the corner by piercing a pin through the "junction" of where the crops would meet. Do this on all four corners and turn the painting over to be face down.

Line a metal ruler along the piercings (a different take of piercings to the usual one). It is very important that the ruler is resting on the work and that the part to be torn off is the edge, not the other way around. You'll see why later. Hold the ruler firmly and grip the edge then tear about 2 cm and pause. Tear down the length of the paper with short tearing movements pausing in between. If you rip it in one shot, you'll lose the feathered edge.

 Turn the paper anticlockwise and do the next edge. You'll find that this edge will feel different - because of the paper grain. You may have to be extra careful. Sometimes quite a wide fluffy bit is left, then you have to go back and try to tear it off gently with your nails. Also, you may have to turn the paper over to check where the piercings are. Keep on concentrating or you'll mess up!

On the left you can see what it looks like from the back - I prefer not to have the ridge so I always tear face-down. The ridge can be gently pushed down with a bone folder, but be careful not to burnish the paper (make it shiny).

This is a close-up to show you what the torn-off strip looks like, next to the paper it was torn from. When you look at it from the back you can see that the edge of the torn-off strip is in fact almost straight and not at all feathered. This is why you had your ruler on top of the work rather than on the edge of the work.
If you wanted to tear two adjacent pieces of paper, the only way to get a nice deckle on both pieces, is to have an extra strip in the middle which is torn off and discarded.

Now for an anecdote: There is a shop called The Deckle Edge in Cape Town, where I lived. Now every time my 18 year old son wanted to borrow my car, I said okay as long as he popped in at the Deckle Edge
for me. At that time I was doing wedding invitations and I got all my coloured paper from them, so I needed paper 2-3 times a week. He really began to hate the Deckle Edge and some years later (only) I saw that he'd altered my digital address entry to The Deckle F. Edge. So there!

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