Step 7!

Make yourself some Wheatpaste.

There are lots of recipes you can find online for wheatpaste, but I’ve found that the simplest method is to just mix water with flour at about a 1.5:1 ratio and cook over medium heat until your gruel reaches a thick, paste like consistency.

As the flour cooks it will get thicker and stickier until it is just sticky lumps. You don’t want this, so either heat slowly and stir almost constantly with a whisk, or use a immersion blender to destroy any lumps that form.

Typically, you’d want to use white flour. Whole wheat flour has little brown bits in it.

You know, up until very recently, I had assumed that wheatpaste was sticky due to gluten. I don’t know when I began assuming this, it’s not like I had done any research into it. All I really knew was that gluten came from flour and it sounds an awful lot like “glue”. I had no idea what gluten was. Then a vegetarian friend of mine took me out for a gluten sandwich. It was quite tasty! (Though a little pricy for something made from flour.)I suppose I still don’t know what gluten is really, except now I know that it can be tasty. (Sadly, this is also the extent of my knowledge about alot of things, including most animals. What is a chicken really? A bird? What are birds? we just don’t know.) Wheatpaste is not tasty. I’ve sampled it.

I suppose maybe starch is responsible for wheatpastes adhesive properties? If anybody knows exactly what the deal is with wheatpaste, please let me know!

So, the next step is to get a container and brush. The size of your brush depends on the size of your poster- you don’t really need to be carrying around a huge brush to put up small posters, and you don’t want to spend alot of time spreading paste around a huge poster with a tiny brush.

I wrote a tutorial on making custom wheatpaste containers years ago. You can find it here.

They still work pretty well, but so will any old container and brush.

Tomorrow, The last step!