Wheat Paste

Making the paste:

First off, materials…grab some flour. Cheap, no-name, white flour is perfect for this. You can easily pick some up for $1. The rest you should already have around the house. You probably already have flour at the house, but given that you’ll be using a lot, it is good to have some replacement flour on hand.

In all, you will need
1. flour
2. water
3. cooking pot
4. stove
5. stirring utensil (wisk preferably)
6. container for the paste
sugar is optional

Making the paste is fairly easy. First you have to decide how much you want to make. For every cup of flour you’ll want 4 cups of warm water (1:4 ratio). I make anywhere between a couple cups of paste to over a gallon of paste depending on my project, just keep everything in the proper ratio. Mix until there is pretty much no clumping left since you want a very smooth mixture.

After being properly mixed, place the pot on the stove using medium heat. Mix it often with the wisk. As it slowly comes to boil you’ll find it starts chunking at the bottom of the mixture. Break this up with the wisk and continue mixing. Eventually it will slowly get thicker until it gets it reaches a glue like consistency. At this point, you can add a little bit of sugar to add extra “stickiness” to the mixture. Mix the sugar in and take it off the stove. Don’t leave it boiling or the sugar will burn.

Pour the mixture into your container, let it cool, and then paste it up! You can toss the extra in the fridge for later, but after a couple days the wheatpaste will go bad and you’ll have to make a new batch.



Getting up

Pasting is pretty simple. Find a nice semi-smooth wall. It doesn’t have to be perfectly smooth, but too rough and the poster won’t stick. Concrete is ideal, but dumpsters, brick walls, etc all work. Lay down a good layer of the wheatpaste onto the surface. Make sure to cover enough area for the entire poster. If you don’t, the poster will have problems once it is dry. Lay the poster onto the now-wet area. Use your wet brush to go over the poster, making it nice and soaked in wheatpaste. Let it dry for a couple hours. Done properly and the poster will be almost impossible to take off.



Going Big

Want to make a poster bigger than the average 8 x 11 sheet? Instead of heading down to your local Kinko’s and paying through the nose why not head to your newspaper’s office instead? Most newspapers keep the ends of their newsprint rolls and sell them really cheap. I was able to get several thousand feet of 30” wide paper for just under $5. Use a Sharpie Mag 44 (or any other wide tipped, oil-based ink marker) to super-size your poster!