Tag Archives: hand sanitizer

The Great Glycerin Experiment

The Great Glycerin Experiment
The Great Glycerin Experiment

I’ve said before that I hate cleaning a gel plate. I decided to clean this grubber while I watched PMartist Studio on Tuesday.

I used hand sanitizer, baby oil, a lint roller and packing tape. I also used a lot of elbow grease. There was still scant smudges of paint on the plate.

During the stream, someone mentioned oil soap in relation to cleaning stencils. For some reason, that made me think of glycerin, and I have lots of glycerin soap melt from making melt and pour soaps.

I dug out a couple of cubes. I misted the plate with water, and started “skating” a cube around.

Using paper towels, the remaining paint tended to come up much more easily than with hand sanitizer or baby oil.

Yesterday, I placed a Walmart delivery order and included a bottle of liquid glycerin.

I tried a few drops on the plate. Again, using a paper towel, I was able to get the very last crumblies of paint off the plate. After it dried, I rubbed baby oil all over the plate and massaged it in. I’ll let it rest until tomorrow.

The lighter areas are just air bubbles under the plate. The plate is lying on a desk top made of solid surface counter top. This is what it looks like bare:

You can see that the gel plate is clean and almost transparent.

Better Brayer Cleaning

Better Brayer Cleaning
Better Brayer Cleaning

I had old chunky white paint hardened on my brayer with no Murphy’s Oil Soap to soak it in. I remembered Tim Holtz saying recently that you could use hand sanitizer to remove acrylic paint. I rubbed some on my brayer, let it sit a couple of minutes, and started rubbing it with a paper towel. I could tell the white was coming off the green layer underneath, but then a strip came off (shown above.)

I kept applying and rubbing and in some cases, whole sections would peel away. I could use just my bare fingers.

It was getting late and aa large section was being stubborn. I applied a thick layer of sanitizer and left it to sit over night.

This morning, I found that the only thing that happened is the sanitizer had evaporated and the stubborn spot would not budge.

I set back in to applying, rubbing and peeling and finally got the brayer as clean as new, even the ends! The End 🤭