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5-1-02   Pulled the pokeweed pulp this afternoon and it made a nice crisp paper, which surprised me given that the pulp looked “fuzzy.”  I thought it would drain too quickly and require the addition of abaca to pull, but it didn’t.  The paper has flecks of dark gray, brown and orange on a background of a tannish cream.  Now I’m really curious about what the green pokeweed stalk will make.

5-2-02  We’ve had nothing but storms here for the last four or five days, one right after the other, and yesterday there were tornados that dumped softball size hail south of us.  Makes gathering plant materials a bit difficult, if not impossible.  I’m not too fond of being caught out in situations like that.  Pulling paper is difficult, too, because at this time of year, I work on the back deck.  I did manage to bleach some of the pokeweed pulp and pull a few sheets of that before yet another storm drove me back inside.  Bleaching the pokeweed doesn’t lighten it as much as it does most other pulps.  However, it does change the background from tan to cream without affecting the gray, brown and orange fibers.

5-3-02  While I was gathering Japanese knotweed to send to Betty Pulver, I found Indian hemp (or hemp dogbane).  There were 40 or so stalks, about 2’ tall now, and they popped off the lateral roots easily.  I really should have waited until they were taller before harvesting, but there was a tractor and bushhog clipping the field.  The fibers from adult Indian hemp plants were once used in making fish nets, string and rope, and remains of these plants have been identified in Hopewell and Adena fabrics dating back to 100-300 B.C.  The bast stripped easily, so I processed that separately from the stem, but as it turned out, that was a useless step, though if the plants had been larger, it might be feasible.  The bast makes a pulp much like milkweed — long fibers that tangle into tight masses and require a formation aid in the vat to keep them from clumping.  Initially, the bast pulp is a rich, gooey green with dark flecks, but it beaches to a bright white.  The goo and the flecks can be floated out in the same manner as those in milkweed bast.  The stems have a core that cooks up into mush.  They must be crushed and washed thoroughly in an open weave strainer to remove this.  I didn’t have enough bast pulp to justify making a formation aid and pulling sheets from it alone, and I regret that, because I suspect it would have been lovely paper.  Instead, I mixed the bast pulp with that from the stem.  The stem pulp acted as a separator, and I was able to pull sheets from the mixture, thought with a bit difficulty.  The Indian hemp paper is rich with fibers from the stem, yet well bonded because of the fine fibered bast.  I would really like to try this plant again when it is larger.

5-4-02  Earlier in the week, I had promised to teach Heather how to strip the bast from mulberry and we had scheduled tree cutting for 11:30 today, but the day started drizzly and cold, maybe 50 degrees.  I just figured that the project was cancelled.  Wrong.  12:15 Heather called to say she and Teresa were free and ready to go.  You’re kidding, I though, but I cut them some slack.  They’re a good 25 years younger than I, and haven’t developed good common sense yet.  However, I don’t know what my excuse is, because I agreed to go.  We downed two trees, cut them to reasonable length, loaded the pieces in the van and brought them back to the house.  Spent the rest of the afternoon, which had dried off, but not warmed up that much, on the back deck stripping the bast, talking and drinking gallons of coffee.  We each ended up a nice pile of bast to work up later.  When stripped without steaming, the lower trunk of the mulberry yields a rougher bast than the limbs.  This I kept separate.  I’ve found from working with the trunk bast in this manner that it will make a slightly textured paper compared to the silky smooth paper from the limb bast. 

5-5-02  After the fog cleared this morning, the sun came out, and I put the large strips of mulberry bark out on the deck to dry.  Cut up the smaller strips from the limbs into 1” lengths to be cooked, probably tomorrow.  **Yesterday I found some last year’s Indian hemp stems and gathered about a pound of those.  There aren’t enough just to do the bast, so I chose to do the entire stem, bast and all.  Cut that up this morning and set it on to cook for four hours.  About five minutes after putting it in the beater, I knew there were going to be problems.  Because the stems, though soft, were chunky, I raised the drum, but the fine bast fibers (very similar to those from milkweed) separated from the stems and tangled with the stem fibers, creating clumps that blocked the intake.  Fooled around with adding more water, raising and lowering the drum for about 30 minutes, but it was getting late and I turned the beater off.  It’s a problem to be faced tomorrow.

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5-6-02  I have now learned that I should have practiced the fine art of hand beating before Hollander beating.  When I started the beater up this morning, it was the same problem as yesterday — chunks embedded in clumps of fine fibers, all of which jammed when going under the drum.  Empted the beater, hand beat the mass of fibers to break down the stem chunks, then put it back in the Hollander and lowered the drum.  No trouble after that.  With all the problems, I’m not sure of beating time on this plant.  I took some pulp out of the vat and pulled sheets, but at that point the sheet was more compressed fiber than paper, so I let the pulp beat an hour longer.  The visible heavy fibers are from the stem, but the stem fibers are bound by the very fine white milkweed like fibers from the bast.  Black specks are the “bark.”   Though the picture doesn’t reflect it well, the pulp that had been beaten an hour longer made much better paper.  Bleaching lightened the paper, but it did not affect the black bark specks.  I find them interesting.  Because the fine bast fibers tend to clump in the vat, especially the more they are stirred, the pulp requires a formation aid.  If the stem is used with the bast, old Indian hemp plants are extremely difficult to deal with and would not be something to tackle without a beater.

5-9-02  Cooked the mulberry limb bast this morning.  Thunderstorms kept me from hand beating.  No place to do it.  Instead, I tried the blender on low/stir.  Far from traditional, but it worked better than I had hoped.  I picked bark from both the cooked bast and the pulp until I could find no more, but still ended up with many black specks in the paper.  They don’t bother me, kind of lend the paper some character, but I’d still like to know how to pull clean paper from mulberry.  **We have had thunderstorms for it seems a week, but we finally got some sun this afternoon.  Good thing because I had pulp that desperately needed drying.  It was that or freeze it before it went bad.  Spun two loads — one pokeweed, the other Indian hemp — in the washer, then made tufts and spread those on bed sheets in the sun to dry. 

5-10-02  I need help identifying a plant that I used to make paper today ( full view / closeup).  The plant may be an escape, though I believe it is a wildflower in the phlox family.  Two years ago I gathered the seeds from plants I found growing behind the Guild office in Old Town Berea.  They were planted both in sun and shade, and it prefers shade.  Last year the plants formed 1.5-2’ rosettes of lance like leaves with finely serrated edges, but did not form stems or blooms until this year.  Each base has multiple stems which grow to 3’ tall.  The four-petal flowers are white, very pale pink and pale lavender.  (All examples of phlox that I have found had five-petals.)  Leaves are clasping on a slick, only slightly hairy green stem.  It blooms in late April and early May here in Kentucky.  [My thanks to Lee Scoville and Linda Wallpe from the papermaking list for identifying this plant as Dame’s Rocket.]  Because of this year’s wet spring, the plants did exceptionally well, too well, in fact.  When the winds came, the tall blooming spires blew over onto the bloodroot and were causing that to rot.  Even though the plant was blooming, I had to cut most of it to save the plants underneath.  Waste not, want not...papermaking material.  I stripped the leaves, cut the stems to 1” lengths and cooked for 3.5 hours in washing soda.  There wasn’t enough plant material to justify the beater, so I used the blender (2 minutes).  The plant stems make an excellent paper, pale olive with a thin, fine fibered background and slightly heavier fibers floating on its surface.  Would make an excellent backlit paper.

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5-11-02  Bleached the remaining pulp from the Dame’s rocket and it turned from light olive to gold.  Strange, but even the tissue paper thin sheets don’t look that way unless backlit.  Nice paper.  **Common violets make a blanket in the shady area in our yard just under the edge of the pines.  The year’s almost constant rains have given them every chance to grow tall and wild.  This afternoon I harvested a half a cooker full of just the stems.  Last September I cooked a small pot of the stems and leaves and the pulp made a gorgeous paper. I would have done more, but the time/labor factor was so great because the stems were short.  Not so this year.  The stems on these violets were 12-14” long, and the area was so clean of other plants that they could be gathered by the handfuls.  Put them on and cooked for an hour, then washed them through several waters.  I’ll process them tomorrow.  Thought they make lovely paper by themselves, I’ll likely try them with some of the mulberry bast, as well.

5-12-02  I had hoped to reproduce paper I made last September from the violet stems, but it wasn’t possible.  The stems were too tender and processed into fibers that were too fine.  Just underlines the fact that the time when a plant is harvested can make all the difference in the world in the paper.  Immature plants often produce nothing but mush, while that same plant harvested at maturity or when dry may be nearly impossible to break down into fibers fine enough to hydrate.  There is an optimum time  to harvest, depending on what is expected out of the plant.  The pure violet stem pulp was so fine, it went through and bonded to the screen itself and would not release.  When I mixed it with red mulberry bast pulp, the sheet released readily.  The mixture of mulberry and violet stems makes a thin paper with pleasing points of interest.  Nice paper.  **Cut the obedient plants back so they would branch out and grow lower to the ground.  Couldn’t resist trying a few stems, but after the morning’s experience with the tender violet stems, I only processed a few.  Same result — the stems were so tender, they processed into mush.  Mixed some mulberry with the mush and pulled a couple of sheets.  Made a green sheet with a few plant fibers visible.  Will try this one again in the fall.

5-14-02  I really hadn’t intended to work with plants today, but for some time I’ve wanted to try Kentucky bluegrass, and this morning I noticed that it was growing thick on a bank beside the house.  It was just beginning to send up seed stalks, and I wanted to try the plant before the stalks became tough.  Cut and cooked a half a pot, and I’m delighted with the results.  Because I expected the fibers to be fine, I underprocessed the pulp just a little so there would be some character to the paper.  The unbleached paper is nice — a solid green with flecks of deeper green and brown — but the bleached bluegrass paper is outstanding and pulls delightfully thin!  It reminds me somewhat of Japanese painting.  Initially, I was disappointed, because I had hoped for a white paper with flecks of color, but the pulp bleached out to gold.  This proved to be a better background for the colored fibers than white would have been.  **This afternoon I went for a walk down by the creek and found curly dock.  Also found that the Indian hemp had shot up and was 4’ tall.  Harvested enough dock for a trial pot and enough hemp to make a full pot of the bast.  Cut and cooked the stalks from the dock and put them in the beater while I stripped the hemp bast. I let the Hollander beat for an hour, then decided to shut it down and finish tomorrow.  The day has been long enough.

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5-15-02  Long day.  Put the Indian hemp bast on to cook and cranked up the Hollander again with the curly dock.  Let that beat for nearly two hours, then took some pulp out and pulled a test sheet to see how far along it was.  At that point, the fibers were somewhat heavy and would have required a formation aid, so I thought I would let it beat a while longer.  Over the next hour or so, the fibers floating on the surface and those I could pull up with my hands didn’t seem to have diminished that much, and I let it keep beating...and beating…  Lesson — I really should have pulled another sheet along the way rather than depending on judgment.  When I empted the pulp into a paint strainer after 4.5 hours of beating, the fibers were so fine, water didn’t want to drain out.  Took about twice as long to empty the load.  However, I will say that overbeaten curly dock makes an excellent, fine fibered deep reddish brown paper, which can be pulled as thin as you want.  Bleached, it yields a rather featureless cream colored paper.  If a dab of unbleached pulp is added back to this, though, the paper becomes quite interesting, with the dark fine fibers coursing through the sheet.  I would highly recommend it as a paper source, though it requires a Hollander to process.  **The Indian hemp bast pulp is a pill!  It forms a mass of fibers that are difficult even to pull apart, and I’m not sure quite what to do with it yet.  I did float off quite a bit of the “bark,” but in the process, a small amount of bast went with it.  I thought, what the hey, and pulled a couple of sheets of that.  Weird paper...interesting, but weird.  **Made the mistake of going out to Indian Fort Theater to check on the setup for the Guild Fair this weekend.  Ended up coming home with three 2” mulberry sprouts and accompanying limbs, and those had to be stripped.  I stripped and debarked the main stalks and limbs, but the smallest limbs I only stripped the bast without debarking it, other than to run my hands down each strip to knock off any loose bark.  I’m going to process that with the bark on and pull sheets just to see if I can make a paper similar to one Ray Bliss Rich sent me.

5-16-02   Cooked and processed the bark covered bast from the small mulberry stems.  Makes an interesting paper and the quality is excellent.  It has just a bit more bark than Ray’s paper, but the ratio could be adjusted easily by adding more clean pulp to the vat.  **I’m not participating in the Guild Fair this weekend, but I had to take a couple of things the Guild wanted to borrow out to the fair site.  While I was there, I couldn’t resist harvesting narrow leaf plantain stems from the amphitheater steps.  Last July I did plantain, but the stems were far too tough then.  May stems should be more tender.  Brought them home, cut in 1” lengths, cooked and processed in the beater for 2 hours.  The bottom 1/2” of the stems is quite tough and took longer to beat.  Would be a good idea to cut off and discard that part of the stem.  Too late to pull sheets tonight.  Tomorrow, maybe.

5-19-02  Tomorrow was a long way away.  Guild Fair and cold weather stood in the way of papermaking.  Pulled the plantain stem pulp today.  The vat really needed a formation aid, but I didn’t bother, and the long fibers made pulling difficult.  Don’t know whether cooking longer or beating longer would have helped.  It makes good paper, but the color isn’t outstanding.  Because of that and the difficulty pulling, I doubt I’ll do this one again.  **While I was at the Fair today, I gathered Gray’s sedge, Philadelphia fleabane and a few stalks of curly dock to try later when dry.  Cooked the sedge to pull tomorrow.  **Whenever I strip mulberry without steaming, there is always a thin layer of bast that adheres to the outer bark.  Leaving this isn’t much of a worry because it isn’t as good quality as the inner bast and leaving it makes pulling easier.  Still...it is bast.  I’ve been wondering whether cooking the bast and bark together and processing that would yield a paper.  The bark is considerably heavier than that from the small limbs that I’ve done before, and I expect it will yield a coarser paper than that made on the 16th, but worth a try.  Cooked up some of the bast/bark I had left to try tomorrow.

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5-20-02  Processed the Gray’s sedge I cooked yesterday.  It makes a very fine, slick pulp and pulls a lovely, smooth green sheet with enough fiber to make it interesting.  The yellow/cream colored bleached sedge isn’t quite as interesting, though it is excellent paper.  **The mulberry bast/bark from the larger limbs was a hoot!  Yes, it does make solid paper, but it is mostly inclusions.  The sheets are heavy from the bark and a bit limp because there is so much of it, but the paper does have its use as a decorative sheet.  **Cut and cooked the entire fleabane stem.  Pulped it in the blender.  It is thick, but not slick. I suspect beating it in the Hollander would have produced a far superior pulp and paper, but I didn’t have enough plant material to justify that.  It makes a yellowish cream paper of good quality, but not outstanding appearance.  The bleached fleabane is a soft cream and quite pretty.

5-21-02  Bleached the remaining plantain pulp.  While pulling paper from unbleached plantain was difficult, pulling it from the bleached pulp was next to impossible.  Ended up adding abaca to separate the plantain fibers in the vat and pulled a few sheets.  Doesn’t show in the picture, but the long plantain fibers shine in the light and makes a pretty bleached paper.  However, the plant really isn’t worth the effort.  **Went by the Guild office to sign checks and found quite a few horseweed plants growing in the flowerbed.  I weeded the flowerbed, and of course, I brought the horseweed home.  The plant odor is interesting, and it’s my understanding that the terpene oil secreted by the plant produces itching and allergic reactions in some people, but it doesn’t seem to bother me.  Stripped and cooked just the bast from the plant.  Makes a lovely fine fibered light green paper with heavier gold fibers floating on the surface.  Bleached the remaining pulp to pull tomorrow.  **Earlier in the year I made paper from dried pokeweed stalks.  The plant was difficult to break down, but made a pleasant heavy, good quality paper.  While I was in Old Town, I cut several pokeweed stalks to try green.  Except for the bast, there seemed to be no fiber at all in the stalks, so I stripped only that and set it on to cook. 

5-22-02  Bleached the remaining horseweed bast and pulled a few sheets from it.  Makes lovely, almost white paper, fine fibered in the background with heavier fibers on the surface.  **Green pokeweed doesn’t seem to be worth the effort.  The paper is nice, actually much nicer than the dried pokeweed paper, but the pulp yield from the cooked bast isn’t enough to justify gathering and stripping.  I’ll likely cut a stalk later on this summer and see if the inside has any fibers then.

5-23-02  Spent most of the day trying to dry and use up pulp.  Because my main interest is simply finding out what kind of paper a particular plant will make, I end up with far more pulp than I use.  Nearly three solid weeks of rain has kept me from drying it, and my refrigerator had reached saturation point.  (Read that as there was no room for food.)  Pulp keeps well refrigerated, so there was no danger of losing it, but I had left some sitting out for a few days and that was beginning to get a bit...slick?  I needed some stationery, so I pulled envelopes and flat sheets from a mixture of curly dock, abaca and cotton rag.  It wasn’t quite as dark as I wanted, but it’s still a nice dusty rose.  Ended up mixing several odds and ends just to use them up.  That’s bad.  No way to duplicate those sheets ever, and some of them were just downright pretty.  Now that they’re pulled, I don’t even know what went into them.

5-25-02  Spent the day pulling paper for books to be juried by the Kentucky Craft Marketing Program.  I had paper for the covers (cotton twine/daylily stalk paper), but not what I wanted for the spine guard and pastedowns, nor did I have paper for the signatures.  I settled on Japanese knotweed/lemongrass/Indian hemp for the pastedown and spine guard, but I kept fumbling around for something for the signatures.  Finally settled on abaca with just a hint of hosta stems/leaves as an inclusion.  Pulled 30 sheets of those and exchange dried all in the press.  Made one book cover and back and left those in the press overnight.

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5-26-02   The recent rains and storms have pretty well finished off my bearded iris, so this morning I cut, cooked, and processed iris stalks and pulled the paper.  Both the unbleached and bleached iris stalk paper is crisp and shiny.  The stalk paper processed in the Hollander is not as heavy as that done in a blender.  **This afternoon, I went out to the Indian Fort Theater to cut mulberry to send to a friend.  The Theater, 3 miles from town. has a large partially paved parking lot, 1/4 mile of trail up to a natural amphitheater, all surrounded by 1800 acres of woods.  It’s a rather isolated place.  As I pulled into the lot, I saw that there was a bike show/rally going on.  We're talking vroom-vroom Harley's here, not little scooters.  Row after row of cycles were parked in front of the entrance and they were accompanied by husky, bearded guys with tattoos, sleeveless leather jackets and heads covered in red bandanas.  I thought, gee, do I *really* want to drive up the side of that parking lot, crawl out of the van and cut down trees in full sight of those husky Harley hunks?  Never being one to pay much attention to what I think, I did it, but you'd be surprised at how quickly an old woman can move.  The bikers were about 75 yards away.  They just leaned against their bikes, smoking whatever they were smoking and watched.  Before edging out of the van, I made sure my cell phone was on and easily accessible, knowing full well, mind you, that there is absolutely no signal at the Theater.  We draw comfort from strange things.

5-28-02  The morning was spent binding a “fan cover” book for the KCMP jurying.  The papers for the fan are (top to bottom:  black willow, red mulberry, Japanese knotweed, Indian hemp, horse dung, Siberian iris/wild garlic, pokeweed and Boston fern.  The binding involves three different types of stitching (top to bottom) — modified kettle, tape stitch, Coptic, tape and modified kettle.  The tape stitching is done over suede “hinges”  rather than binders’ tape.  **Went by the Guild office to sign checks, and while I was there I wandered across the CSX tracks and gathered wool grass and Japanese brome to try.  **The afternoon was so lovely, I went down to Silver Creek in search of more curly dock.  (I’m enamored with the fiber right now.  Next week it may be something else.  I’m wishy-washy like that.)   Came home hot and itchy, but with a full beater load of dock.  This time I crushed it before cooking, thinking this would make it unnecessary to hand beat before putting in the Hollander.  (FWIW, driving a van up and down the driveway over the top of a pile of curly dock does not work.)  Cooked the dock for 3 hours, then left in the pot overnight.  **I thought the mulberry gods had blessed me when a neighbor across the way hollered to say she’d trimmed her tree and I could have the limbs.  Instead of a blessing, it was a curse.  This was a white mulberry with many, many small twigs growing on the branches.  I stripped what I could, then bound the branches together for the chipper.

5-29-02  Processed the curly dock in the Hollander, but found that it was still necessary to hand beat to prevent jamming at the drum.  The first dock I did had been processed for something like 4.5 hours and I thought it was over beaten.  I was wrong.  Dock does take something like 4.5-5 hours in the beater to achieve a fine, smooth pulp, but it is well worth it.  While I was waiting on the dock, I pulled a little of the under processed pulp out and threw it in the vat with some bluegrass/plantain/iris stems that I’d been fooling with.  Pulled a few envelopes and some stationery and the dock inclusion is striking.  **Japanese brome is a fairly common grass that often grows in solid stands alongside roadways.  It’s a rather drab looking grass until the seed heads mature, then the whole plant turns a lovely dusty pink.  Cut the brome into 1-1.5” pieces, discarding the seed heads, and cooked for 1.5 hours.  Emptied the dock from the Hollander, put the brome in and beat it for 2 hours.  Haven’t pulled anything from the brome pulp yet, but from the looks of the very fine, but long fibers, I have a feeling the stems should have been cut to 1/2” lengths.

5-31-02  I was right.  The long fibers make the  brome difficult, but not impossible, to pull.  It really needs a formation aid in the vat to disperse the fibers evenly.  If I keep the fiber concentration down in the vat so that it is necessary to pull three times to get a sheet, it will pull evenly without a formation aid.  Just takes longer.  Brome makes a good, though unimpressive paper.  The fine fibers form a solid base for the longer, heavier fibers, but it is very dull, no sheen at all.  However, adding some bleached iris stalk pulp produces a shine on the paper that brightens it considerably and improves the looks.  Bleaching produces a cream colored paper, which for some reason, is easier to pull than the unbleached.  

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