One of many goals, long term, is for me to make and fold my own paper. By “make paper” I mean collect, process and form sheets from pulp. I clarify because one school of thought around “making paper” is laminating or treating existing sheets – I do that also, but yeah, there is a distinction.
I attended a workshop out back of Gympie with Dion Chandler, using my newly acquired mold and deckle, and pulled (get the lingo 😛 ) A3 sheets – by the end I got pretty consistent at it but need more practice.
I ended up making A3, A4 and a smaller “letter” size”, love the deckle edges and the structure of the sheets. I have also Methyl Cellulosed some and, so long as I apply the MC to the paper (and not the glass I am sticking it to) then the sheets come away crisp and sturdily hold folds crisply as well.
That workshop we were pulling from a vat that started mostly with cotton pulp, and gradually had recycled kozo (mulberry) to it – quite a resilient mix. the resultant sheets are precious and wonderful.
Tucked away in an inconspicuous corner of the deserted clearing, nestled almost invisibly among the leaf litter, the first signs of civilization were found in the form of a rough-hewn but definitely hominid-worked paper offering. For whom, to what, why … we shall never know:
Followers of the blog will notice occasional references to paper making pursuits. This post looks at the most recent results of a paper making workshop I attended in early July 2023. I had previously (back in 2019) been a member of PAQ (Paper makers and Artists, Queensland) but found full time work made attending events difficult. Now I am retired I have more freedom, so reapplied for membership.
The group’s interests in paper are diverse – from botanical paper making, monoprinting, encaustics, stitching, collage, pulp sculpture and more – my interests are (fairly narrowly?) folding, but it is important to have ones interests informed by a wider palette so I am very much the learner in that group.
Previous workshops I made sheets with finely beaten banana stem and cotton display board, day lily and lemongrass pulp, and still have some of the paper from that session. This session we pulped banana stem (coarsely this time) and mixed it with lemon grass, Philodendron, and South African Pigeon Grass stem, in various combinations. The pulp was added to water, then a suspension-aid made from water soaked chopped okra, which generates a mucilage that makes the vat water more goopy, helping the pulp to stay in suspension longer before settling out. The results were much coarser paper, but it presented an interesting challenge to see what I could fold from it.
I first pressed then dried my sheets, brought home still dripping. I carefully separated them from their couching sheets (old torn up bed linen) and selected sheets to process further. Using a fairly stiff batch of Methyl Cellulose, I stuck sheets to my glass and let them dry, reasoning (correctly it turns out) that the MC would make the sheets more pliable and bind the fibres more closely together (given some of them were very loosely bound, this seemed like a good plan).
