Back to the new hobby...

I've spent the last 4 days making recycled paper. It's been coming on for weeks...ever since I first read No Impact Man. There's a link in his early posts to instructions for making paper from junk mail. I tried to talk myself out of it, for fear of having another obsession. If I allowed myself to know how much money I spent when I finally fell for beads, holy shit...But, suddenly I had to make paper. Turns out it is slow, backbreaking, and really, really cool. There is such satisfaction in the work of it. The shredding, the soaking, the processing... I love making up the paper pulp. The racket of the food processor (just slightly younger than yours truly), the quiet when moving my hands through the water stirring up the slurry... its just fantastic. Waiting for the individual sheets to dry is hard, but what beauty when it's finally ready! My friend scoffs, says it's hard to write on recycled paper with a dip pen (we don't discuss my habitual use of ball points. It's beneath us), but why write on this? Just making it, looking at it's texture and the feathery edges, it's almost enough even if I never use it. And yet, I've seen wonderful art work matted with paper like this. The paper itself can be art! If I manage to get a flower press and learn to use it before summer is over this could turn out to be something really lovely. Pressed Sonoma County bounty in handmade paper? It's all been done before, but turning so much wasted paper into such tactile and visual wonder? Where's the downside? I know she's imagining getting a stack of dark grey, chunky "homemade stationary" as a gift, but another thing I learned this cycle (!!!) is not to combine learning a new craft with gifting. I wait to see how it turns out and what I feel like doing with it. No more learning how to make something so I can, at the same time, start a temporary Christmas sweatshop and make a ton of them. What a way to strip something of any fun or creativity. The pressure, fer Chrissakes!
See? It's like this year I finally grew some sense. And I'm terrified of losing it. Or worse, of finding out I've lost it many times before.

So, about papermaking. I've taken many pictures, as if to do a tutorial, but going along with a resolution not to teach things I've only started to learn myself, recommend books I'm only half way through and movies not yet seen, but sitting in my Netflix queue, I will refrain from actually posting that way.
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However, I would like to point out 3 things I have to add to the excellent tutorials already out there, there and there (and now here!) on the web, that I came up with as I went along:


#1. I did not make my own frames with wood, saw, nails/staples. I dug out some old frames with broken glass and used a hot glue gun to attach window screen fabric to the inside of the frames. This only worked with wood frames, not metal, but it worked beautifully. Being submerged in water does not seem to affect the adhesion at all.







#2. We (Lucie helped for a while) added pencil shavings, from an electric or hand sharpener, especially colored pencils to our white pulp. You get the specks of paint from the outside of the pencils and the small wood fibers that look lovely in the finished sheets of paper. I do recommend rinsing the shavings in a fine strainer to remove most of the graphite. Lucie and I find the smell unpleasant.

#3. After the first batch of pulp and finished paper I decided to sort my raw materials a little. I started to separate newsprint from computer paper and first class junk mail. Newsprint turns a dark grey I don't love, although it has it's purposes (later idea to pursue), and I found that white computer paper that has been printed on makes nearly white recycled paper. The best discovery though was the few pieces of colored computer paper. We made a gorgeous batch of pulp with purple and pink , a vibrant blue, and, finally, a tiny batch of yellow. As we used the scant amounts of these colored pulps the slurry got pretty thin and I would add our white pulp, making the colors softer and lighter with each sheet.