Wafer Paper Dos and Don'ts

Wafer paper is one of those amazing products that we have available to us within the sugar world, but it's also quite finicky. I'm Rachael Teufel, and in this lesson, I'd like to share with you some dos and don'ts for wafer paper, to help you be more successful in working with this particular medium. The first thing that I highly recommend is making sure that you store your wafer paper properly. Now, what I have in front of me is simply just a plastic crafting box. Any box that you can close, and close fairly tightly, is recommended. You don't want to leave your wafer paper just sitting out. What happens is wafer paper is actually quite a dry product. So I'm gonna grab just a couple pieces here to kind of show you the differences. When wafer paper is properly hydrated, it actually can bend and twist and turn and do all sorts of really amazing things. However, when it gets too dry, it doesn't have enough hydration in it, you will find that your wafer paper will actually break and tear very easily. So the one way to know whether or not your wafer paper is in a good condition is simply fold over the corner. So did you hear the snap? That snap actually tells me that my wafer paper is too dry and it means that as I start to manipulate my wafer paper into different shapes or flower petals or ribbons, whatever it is that I might be making, I'm gonna struggle with my wafer paper. It's just not going to manipulate the way that we need it to in order to make a beautiful product. So use that test just to know whether or not your wafer paper is conditioned properly. One thing that I do in order to ensure that it is the proper hydration level is I actually keep, these are just kitchen sponges. So I keep them in the box with my wafer paper. Now this kitchen sponge is a fresh sponge. You don't wanna use anything that you have used previously. You want it to be free from any contaminants and you actually wanna use distilled water inside of this Ziploc bag. The distilled water, again, doesn't have all the impurities that we get from tap water, for instance. So it just keeps your sponge nice and clean and it prevents any bacterias and molds and things like that from growing in here. Now I don't seal this bag fully. So when you put your distilled water in here, you wanna make sure that your sponge actually absorbs all of the water. So when you turn this over, you don't want any water dripping out. So just be sure that you use a minimal amount of water. It's enough to soak the sponge but not enough for water just to be spilling out. If you place this in your box and leave this open, the humidity from the sponge is captured inside of the box. And therefore, the rice paper actually will absorb any of that moisture and helps keep it nice and hydrated. And that makes it perfect for any project that you're gonna utilize with wafer paper. Now you have to be careful. One of the don'ts is don't have this so saturated that water could potentially spill out and ruin all of your wafer paper. So just be sure that when you are doing this, again, this one maybe has a little too much water. I'm sort of testing and I can see some water dripping here. So this one might be a little bit too full and it would potentially damage things. So just be a little bit more careful with how much water you're utilizing inside your baggies. Now, wafer paper normally comes in sealed bags. It isn't the perfect seal in most cases. This one just has like a tiny little seal of plastic. It's just not super secure. So my suggestion is when you get a bag of wafer paper, right from the start, just go ahead and place it right into a larger Ziploc bag, just to make sure that you've got some added protection in case any of these seals are not completely airtight. And that way you won't lose the original hydration that's coming within your purchased items. So sometimes these end up breaking. Like this one, for instance, this is just a really thin flimsy plastic. And just in shipping, it often will just kind of like come apart in certain places. So it is just not a super protective plastic. You can find extra large Ziploc bags in most major grocery stores. So just buy the really large ones. You can slide 'em right inside. It keeps your wafer paper sealed up and perfect. I also keep some smaller bags in my wafer paper box, and this is more because if you are working on a project and you have lots of extra cutouts, that takes a lot of time to punch and punch and punch all of these little circles. So don't ever throw away any of your wafer paper. Even if it's just a handful of circles, I throw it into a little baggy, seal it up, keep it in my box, and the next time I just need a couple for a project, I have them handy and available to me. I also don't recommend throwing away any of your scraps. So when we cut through our wafer paper, what happens is you end up with irregular shapes, and as you continue to work through, you know, even if you're trying to punch pretty close together, you're still gonna end up with lots of these little pieces that seem unusable. I recommend pulling those scraps away, setting them aside, just put 'em in another Ziploc bag, and I will teach you how to create wafer paper glue from your scraps. So check out the lesson, all about wafer paper glue, and I'll show you how to use up your scraps so that you're not wasting any of your wafer paper or money either. The other thing that happens with wafer paper is if it gets too wet, it will actually start to dissolve. So I recommend using small spray bottles for anything that you're gonna do in regards to putting water onto your paper in large amounts. So just spraying a really nice even coat on things is the best way to do it. Always, here's your don't, don't just spray right onto your paper. The first spray usually has some larger particles of water coming out and doesn't have that really super fine mist. So I'll show you what I mean. So usually, when I do my first spray, I get these larger areas of water droplets. And that can cause your wafer paper to start to dissolve much faster in certain areas. And so it's much better if you can spray one off and then go to your surface. I also have a tendency to hold my wafer paper. So I have a tendency to hold my wafer paper over just an area that's not going to be contaminated with any of my water or spray or whatever might be in here. Water or alcohol, typically. But just don't spray it over your surface because what will happen is water will actually start to build up on the surface here. For instance, if I were just to sit here and spray quite a bit, the water starts to build up. You can see there are quite a few droplets already. And so if I happen to be spraying over my surface, I didn't realize it, and I set my wafer paper down, the surface of the wafer paper on the backside is now gonna pick up all of those droplets. So just make sure you're spraying on a different way than your work surface itself. I have a tendency just to kind of keep one section of my table completely clear. If you're just using water, it's no big deal, things will dry. But spray to one side, work in the center, and set your finished work to your other side. And then the other items that we tend to use within the wafer paper world is piping gel. We use wafer paper glue. We use alcohol and water. All of these things need to be used in moderation. If you put too much gel, for instance, onto your sheet of wafer paper, even if you smooth it out, this wafer paper is gonna start to dissolve within minutes. It just is not very tolerant to anything that has a lot of water in it. And that's specifically why we have a tendency to use things that are a little thicker, like a piping gel, for instance. So we'll let that rest over there and I'll just show you. Hopefully that will start to change here in a moment and I'll show you what happens to the wafer paper. So the last item I wanna talk to you about is coloring your wafer paper. So one of the ways that you can color wafer paper is by utilizing a powdered color. And when you do that, if you just grab a little bit of powder onto your brush, you actually wanna try to get an even coating whenever possible. Oftentimes, I will see people just go straight to the wafer paper and start moving their brush. And the problem with that is now I'm going to have a very different level of color throughout my wafer paper. It looks just like I put a brush over top of it and utilized it in that fashion. My recommendation is to grab some color, tap it off for the most part. You're gonna leave just a little bit on here, and then start on the edge of your wafer paper and pull in. And now you can see, while it's not a heavy coverage right at the moment, it's definitely more even than it is over here where I started and stopped with my brush. So I always recommend just tapping it off a little bit and try to pull all the way through whatever section of wafer paper you're covering. Just start on the edge and try to stop on your edge. So that is just kind of a general tip that I use, both for gum paste as well as for wafer paper. But I think it's super helpful, especially for beginners who don't understand the concept of how the powder attaches to the wafer paper. So just make sure that you don't just brush back and forth. Make sure you're doing some longer strokes off and on to your wafer paper so that you don't have any major buildup anywhere. And then oftentimes you can actually airbrush this as well. And that's probably my preferred method of coloring wafer paper, especially if I'm doing large sections of wafer paper for multiple flowers in the same color, because you can really just get a super even distribution of color by utilizing an airbrush. As long as you're doing thin passes and you're moving onto your next wafer paper sheet in order to build color, you would wanna let it dry and layer. Again, too much alcohol or water will literally just disintegrate your wafer paper. So just to show you, you know, you don't want big huge sections of water just kinda hanging out. This is gonna very easily start to dissolve and it becomes like wet tissue paper basically. And then it starts to pull away and break. So if you're having issues with this getting really soggy and breaking on you, you've got way too much water or piping gel even. Same thing happens with the piping gel. It takes a little longer just because it is a gelatinous mixture rather than just straight up water. But that's what will happen with your piping gel as well if you just have too much on it. So those are the dos and don'ts of wafer paper. I'm confident there are lots more dos and don'ts as well, but these are some of the more common ones that I felt are necessary to share with all of you. So I encourage you to grab some wafer paper and start playing. This is a really interesting medium and there's a lot of ways to utilize it.