Sunday Etsy Club – Paper Making

I’m so sorry to be posting this on Tuesday instead of Sunday evening. Sunday was not only Etsy Club, but also my daughter Moyra’s 2nd Birthday! We were super busy all day cleaning, planning, preparing, crafting and partying! Monday was a wild ride too, as we work from home, and we’re feeling the effects of a couple of newspaper ads titled “We Hire Stay At Home Mom’s”. You can imagine the HUGE response…I was on the phone most of the day, and hardly had rest between calls to nurse and eat! So, without further excuse here is the Sunday Etsy Club post!

This week we tried our hands at paper making. I have made paper many times in the past. In fact, I used homemade paper in my wedding invitations three years ago! I love making paper. I love the shredding, blending, messy wonderfulness of it all, but I especially love that I can turn my junk mail and trash into something beautiful and useful! Anyone can make paper with only a few supplies that you probably already have on hand.

First, find a tub that you can use to make the paper in. You may use your kitchen sink, but you may not want to have the excess pulp go down your drain. I found a tub that fit almost perfectly into my sink. Next, you’ll need an old picture frame and some window screen. My barn cats have shredded a big hole in one of my window screens, so we cut that out and used it on the frame since it needed to be replaced anyway.

Cut the screen to be about one inch larger than your frame on all sides, and staple it to the frame securely. You can use a household/office stapler for this, but a staple gun works better. Glued frames are not recommended (our frame fell apart after making only 8 pieces of paper), instead find a frame that is nailed together at the mitered corners, or tack it yourself.

Next, shred your paper! We used three different batches of paper types for our experiment.

The first was plain white paper with black lettering, mixed with some Netflix envelopes. This created some beautiful lavender colored paper with cool red flecks. We then used plain white paper with black lettering that wasn’t quite blended thoroughly, and added some tiny cut pieces of red, green and black fabric and fiber embellishments. This paper had some really cool effects, I love it (it was my mom’s experiment). Lastly, we made paper from the weeds in my yard. I’m not going to say that I recommend this particular mixture. It was a bit unpleasant…I’ll explain more later.

Ok, so we shredded our paper. Then, we blended it in a blender with about double the water (we used four cups to one handful of paper). You need a lot of water in order to save your poor little blender from overworking. Also, make sure that you don’t blend it all at once. I blended four times for about four seconds each session, allowing my blender to rest a bit in between. I actually bought this cheap blender at Walmart just for papermaking a few years ago. I love it!

After blending your pulp, pour it into your tub.

You’ll need about 1.5 blender loads of pulp per page of paper you’d like to create. I blended four batches of my paper pulp and poured them all into the tub together.  Then, you’ll need to double the volume with water. I added water until my tub was nearly full (all but about two inches).

Now, take your screen-covered picture frame and slide it into your tub under the pulp, with the open screen side DOWN.

Place your hands on either side of the frame, and pull it up through the pulp slowly and evenly. You’ll end up with a bunch of pulp on top of your screen. You may need to experiment to get the correct quantity. The faster you pull upward, the thinner the pulp layer will be on your screen. If you feel you need to correct something (like if you accidentally pull up faster on one side than the other) simply put your frame back into the bottom of the tub and begin pulling upward again slowly and evenly.

Once you have your frame with an even layer of pulp upon it, support it on the tub so that you can press on it without it sliding back into the water. Lay a piece of felt or cotton on top of the layer of pulp on your frame. Use your hands to press out as much water as you can through the cloth. Be sure not to be too aggressive here, you don’t want to have your frame plop back down into the water, and you don’t want to manipulate the pulp on top of the frame, resulting in an uneven sheet of paper, or paper with holes. Pull the cloth off gently and wring it out, then replace it atop your pulp-laden screen once more.

After squeezing as much water as you can out this way, flip the frame and cloth upside down on top a small stack of newspaper. The pulp will be pretty stuck to your frame, so don’t worry about it flying off when you flip it over. Next, take a sponge and press it into the back side of your frame, pulling up more water. Empty your sponge back into the tub several times to get as much water out of the paper pulp as possible. Use a little elbow grease, and you’ll get a surprising amount of water out. The more water you remove this way, the less time it takes your paper sheets to dry.

Now, gently peel the paper off of the screen, and allow it to settle down onto the felt or cotton cloth. The paper is pretty fragile while it’s wet, so go very slowly and don’t “pull” the paper, but just gently push it to coax it off of the screen. Once you get it started, it will pretty much just begin falling right off. Remove the frame and then set your paper on it’s felt or cotton fabric aside to dry. It will take the page approximately 24-48 hours to dry. I found that they dried slower on the felt than on cotton napkins. They may also take a bit longer than 48 hours if you squeeze less water out during the sponging process than I did.

After you have made all the sheets it looks like you can make from the pulp you have (you’ll know it’s time to quit or add more paper pulp when the screen is unable to pull up a sufficient amount of pulp for your sheet) then you can take your screen and pour your tub over it. Allow the water to drain, and squeeze the pulp until you have a tight ball like this below. Then, just wrap it up in foil and stick it in the freezer. You can thaw it and add to your next batch of paper. By the way, all these images were 1/2 white paper with black ink and 1/2 Netflix envelopes.

Ok, now for the wild wacky weird weed experiment. We got two bags of green weeds from our yard and chopped them up in a pot.

I cut them to 2-3 inch lengths and added water to cover them and boiled them on medium heat for about 6 hours. Then, they sat in the pot overnight.

The next day, I added them in bunches to my blender and pureed them with water.

They turned a sickly green/white foam, and some of the stalk broke into “hairs” that wrapped around my blender blade. I peeled these off with each batch and just tossed them into my weed pulp in the tub. After about three batches like this, I realized that it wasn’t quite a thick enough mix to make a paper sheet by itself. So, I added two handfuls of shredded white paper to my blender and added that pulp to the mix.

I then added water like before, and began to make my paper sheets with the weed mixture.

It was absolutely disgusting. It looks just as bad as it really was…trust me. I was certain that I’d have some crazy rash today after messing in that stuff for half and hour, but I didn’t.

The paper turned out, well, interesting. It has all kinds of leaves and stemmy pieces in it, and really kept the pattern from the screen. It’s also very thick, and a bit harder than the other papers that we made. I think it may make a good envelope, or embellishment to add to something else, maybe a nature journal? Im not sure I’ll try this again with weeds. Maybe freshly mown grass clippings that don’t have stems and will be much softer to work with. I’m glad I tried it though, it was a way to make something natural and I’m all for natural, man.

Here are our pages laying out to dry. The lavender ones have the Netflix envelopes in them, the grey paper is the one mom made with mostly white paper and small bits of fabric added, and um…the others I’m sure you can guess what those are. Maybe they’ll make nice envelopes? Will the post office take them if the staff needs time off for allergies afterwards?

Tips:

 If you add wildflower seeds to your paper pulp, then you can encourage the recipient of your letter to plant the paper when done! The paper pulp will degrade and feed the seeds as they grow!

Adding colored paper will either change the entire background color of the paper or add “flecks” of color to your pages.

You can have tubs of different colored pulp. After pulling your screen up through the first tub, use a squirt gun to blow away holes in your pulp on the frame. Then use your hands to fill in those holes with the different colored pulp, resulting in a paper with different colors!

Glue a piece of sisal rope to your felt or cloth in the shape of a letter or simple picture. When you couch your paper on top of the felt and allow it to dry over the sisal, it will create an embossed image in the paper. This can also be done with hot glue!

Here are some great websites that also teach paper making techniques:

Learn 2 Make Homemade Paper

Recycling and Hand Papermaking

Robert C. Williams Paper Museum – They have teachers guides for paper making and learning the history of paper – great for homeschoolers!

Paper Making using the Pour Method – they purchased a paper making “kit” to make their paper

Thanks for reading!

Janeen