Biakabutuka
With travel not an option and the weather being hot and sunny, I decided to try my hand at papermaking. I have made paper before and have all the equipment but being an outdoor sport I was often reluctant to set up in the drive way. But, as it turns out, this was a great time to get to work.
I made paper for about two weeks. Denice helped me the first day and is the photographer of the image below.
Paper was made in two rounds.
Round one was milkweed and abaca; dryer lint and abaca; and paper I am calling Straight Outta Shredder, or pulp from our paper shredder. I also made some molds.
Abaca is a banana fiber from the Philippines that is my go to fiber for papermaking as it seems to solve all the problems.
Milkweed, Dryer Lint, Pulp
This is the milkweed paper. It was made from milkweed pulp with some abaca added. The milkweed I had sat in a jar in my basement for years and when opened, it had a pickle smell to it. However, it appeared to make good paper.
This is the dryer lint paper mixed with abaca. While it made very cool paper, I seriously underestimated the effect of all the cat hair that was included.
This is Straight Outta Shredder or the paper I made by taking the shredded pulp from our household shredder and making paper with it.
After a brief break, it was on to Round Two of papermaking.
This is the second round of dryer lint and abaca paper. I used a heat gun to remove some of the hair which I think helped make this paper be more...less creepy.
In my stash in the basement I had a bag of pulp from Arnold Grummer labeled Scrubbed Corn Husk and Cotton which surprised me by not make a really good pull out of the tray. So I added my go to pulp, abaca, and it made the pull terrific.
My last experiment was to use egg cartons. This also was a fail until I added the abaca that held the paper together.
Egg Carton, Dryer Lint, Dryer Lint, Corn Husk and Pulp
Here is one big old stack of paper
No comments:
Post a Comment