Paper-Making 2 - October 25, 2020

Yesterday's paper-making experiment was partially successful.  Let's call it a "learning experience."

Here's a quick run-down of the process:  

1. Gather used paper, tear it into bits, and soak it in water until it gets mushy.

2. Put the mushy pulp in a blender with some water and whizz it to break up the lumps.  I'll call the resulting mixture a "slurry."

3.  Put the slurry into a mold, and press out most of the water.  

4.   Dump out the newly-formed slurry, and let it dry.  Ta-daaaaa . . . paper!

There are multiple ways to accomplish each step.   

The very first thing I did was a mistake; I cut up the cut-away stabilizer in my sewing room trash can, intending to incorporate it into my paper sheets, thinking it would strengthen the paper.  Mistake.  Dumb mistake.  Cut-away stabilizer is meant to stay intact when wet.  It would not dissolve in water.  It would not disintegrate in the blender.  Since I had cut it into tiny, tiny bits, picking those bits out of the slurry was out of the question.  But since I had a bucket of stabilizer/paper mix, I decided to go ahead with the whole process, knowing that the resulting paper would not turn out well.  I wanted to experiment with adding things like flower petals and leaves to the paper and thought I might as well do all of the experimenting at once.  

While the paper was soaking, I constructed a mold out of two old 5 x  7 picture frames.  I stapled window screen to the flat side of one frame, and hinged the other frame to the first frame with fabric straps, so that the contraption would open like a door.  This worked fine.  In one of the videos, the mold had a layer of hardware cloth under the window screen.  I did not see the point of that until I got to step 3 (above).  The window screen, by itself, tended to "give" as I pressed down on it.  A layer of hardware cloth (or even plastic needlepoint canvas) would support the window screen better.

Here's a picture of my experiments:

The sheet on the left is the first one I made.  It is a combination of stabilizer and regular paper.  You can see the white bits of stabilizer showing in the paper.  

The top right sheet has a leaf pressed into it.  I poured some slurry into the mold, added the leaf, and poured more slurry on top.  As you can see, there are bare spots.  The other side of the paper has random orange stains.

The lower right sheet was made from paper towels that I'd used to mop up water from the previous two attempts.  It has tiny rose petals pressed into it.  It is, by far, the best-looking of the three attempts.

All three sheets are still pretty wet nearly 24 hours later (it's been raining), but they are holding together.  I expect that none of them are actually usable, except maybe the one with rose petals, but I doubt it could be written on, as I did not put any sizing in the slurry.

I'm going to keep trying.