Favorite Tool: Japanese Screw Punch

I’m late to the Japanese screw punch party, but now that I know about it I’m a big fan. Allison Holcomb and Ellie Fitzgerald introduced me to this bookbinding and leather working tool that they use in the paper lab. I’ve been using it to make cute little perfectly circular fills for dermestid damage in wool coats. You can make SO MANY little circles so quickly and they come out the side of the tool in perfect little stacks.

I made a whole set of them in different sizes and kept them in a petri dish next to me while I worked. This was for a project that already had a cotton lining introduced behind the damaged wool as part of a previous treatment campaign. I added little dots of Lascaux 303 to the back of my circles and adhered them to the non-original cotton. It worked beautifully and was a surprisingly fast system for aesthetic compensation of dozens of little holes.