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This flaky Torah is exceptionally annoying. The letters often run into each other, which is bad news in a Torah; each letter must be surrounded by blank space, so if letters touch each other, they're invalid. The original scribe of the flaky Torah must have been very careless indeed; a letter runs into another letter once every two or three lines, the whole way through the sefer. So I have to go through twice, once with a knife to fix the careless mistakes and once with a pen to fix the flaking.
I keep having to dilute the ink, as well. If the ink's too sticky it just picks up flakes and takes ages to apply; you want it runny enough that it just goes over and between the flakes. But if you dilute it too much, it spreads much too far and just makes an uncontrollable blob which soaks in and is hard to remove, so you have to be careful and keep topping up with small amounts of alcohol, since the ink gets sticky after about an hour.
Thence to class at YU and thence to teaching bat mitzvah, and thence home to finish correcting the current Megillah and sewing it together.
I keep having to dilute the ink, as well. If the ink's too sticky it just picks up flakes and takes ages to apply; you want it runny enough that it just goes over and between the flakes. But if you dilute it too much, it spreads much too far and just makes an uncontrollable blob which soaks in and is hard to remove, so you have to be careful and keep topping up with small amounts of alcohol, since the ink gets sticky after about an hour.
Thence to class at YU and thence to teaching bat mitzvah, and thence home to finish correcting the current Megillah and sewing it together.
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