Question about Soaking: Canada Sc1441-1442

The hologram on this stamp is very thick and I have never seen any damage when soaking this issue off a paper cutout.  Thin holograms, as are used for the vast majority of holographic stamps, are fairly fragile and are prone to wrinkling during the soaking process, and I do use a method for those.  They are always the last ones to go into the sink - I don't start working on them until all the other stamps are finished.  I remove them from their backing paper as soon as they will come loose.  They then go under a flat smooth thing (my stamp sweatbox, as it turns out) on the formica countertop while I am filling the drying book with the current batch of stamps, going straight from under the sweatbox to the drying book as the last stamps I put in before closing the book and stacking weight on top of it.  This gives me the best results for getting a holographic stamp off without the hologram wrinkling during the soaking & drying process.

But as mentioned, this particular Canadian stamp uses a non-standard holographic image and it's very robust.  It takes quite a bit longer to soak that stamp off of backing paper, since the hologram isn't water-permeable it takes longer to get enough moisture through the backing paper, similar to the extra time needed to get a stamp off of a postcard with a plastic film covering the image side to make it glossy.  That extra soaking time will mean that the non-hologram stamps will be quite a bit softer when it's finally time to get the backing paper off, and I think it's much more likely that you'll accidentally pull apart some stamps at the perforations.  You won't need to worry about damaging the hologram, it will be the rest of the piece that will be the limit for how fragile it is.

Here are examples of damaged thin holograms due to soaking, nabbed from a HipStamp seller.

 

Ryan