I was cleaning some cooked Paper Mulberry (Broussonetia papyrifera) bark, scraping the outer layers that was outer bark and the remnants of the dried up fleshy parts of the plant, and a thought occurred to me. The residue was really fibrous – what would paper even look like made from this waste?

Given I had the time, equipment and curiosity to fuck around and find out, I hand-beat the residue, rinsed the pulpy mess until it was clean, and then divided the ball into 3, figuring (via guestimation) that 1/3 of the blob was enough to make an A3 sheet.

I took 1/3, added it to a bucket of water and agitated it vigorously to breakup and disperse the fiber uniformly through the water. Then, using a rectangular chinese food container, I gently ladled the really watery pulp onto my new A3 Mold and Deckle, in the lid of my new vat. Taking the time to distribute the fibre evenly and thinly. When all the fiber was gone, I couched the resultant sheet onto glass, then added some smooth poly-cotton sheeting material as a layer to isolate the sheet, then added a flanellette layer, another poly-cotton sheet material layer and then repeated the sheet formation process another 2 times.

Topped off the “post” with another layer of flannelette, and a top sheet of glass. Putting this sandwich on an angle to encourage the drips onto the floor drain, I then added a besser block to add firm squishing pressure, and left it to drip overnight. I must engineer a paper press that is more consistent.

Separating the sheets was easy, I left the now drier pulp sandwiched but removed the flannelette and spread out on the vinyl floor to dry. As the top layers dried I could easily peel them off to get my first views of the sheets. The glass-couched sheet was waaaaay thinner than to the other two – my bad, my dividing of the fiber into 3 was much less accurate than I imagined.

The sheets that dried on poly-cotton shrank slightly, the glass-couched sheet stayed flat and hella thin.

After peeling it from the glass, I decided to fold something. This time I did a 2-model fold. A box-pleated little man was the main fold – that remained attached to the outer parts of the sheet by a foot. and a tiny Crane (tsuru) attached to his hand.

To my surprise, the paper took folds pretty well – the box-pleat pre-creasing worked pretty well, the collapse was fiddly but proceeded without significant paper fatigue on the little join points.

Originally, in my head, it was going to be something deep and meaningful – like the body of a man dead from the impact of a fall, reaching for a crane. It was originally titled “Did he fall, was he pushed or did he jump?” – a deep and meaningful study of the pressures of being a man in the current age…. but in the end it looks like a guy folding a crane … so….

I now have a bunch of processed Paper Mulberry fiber (and boy does it give MORE fiber than fruiting mulberry, but is really similar in quality) – I cannot wait to do some paper formation with it – some beating is needed however.

TLDR – I folded another partially cut out model still connected to it’s parent sheet. I really like this one also, but may not frame it (have not yet decided) – what do you think?