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8-1-02
Earlier in the week I had harvested some Korean lespedeza, but I didn’t get
enough to justify cooking and beating, so I went out to the Artisan Center this
evening to get more. Found what I wanted and was walking the edge of the
retaining fence when I spooked a doe and two fawns. They bounded toward the
road and I had visions of venison being flattened on the road, but there were no
cars to be seen when the trio crossed the road into the far field. Thankful
whew! Later going back to the van, I saw a red fox trailing alongside one of
the blocks of trees and brush that has been left standing. The juxtaposition of
wildlife against the backdrop of interstate noise seems more than a little
bizarre. Not far from the van, first year trumpet vines were running across the
ground, some of them 12’-15’ long. The vine has a bast to it that I think would
be usable in quantity, but there weren’t enough of the young vines to justify
using only the bast. The interior stem seems fibrous but isn’t woody, perhaps
because it is so young. Harvested all I could find in that spot. Judging from
the current bulldozer work, the area will be scraped and flattened shortly.
It’s harvest now or not at all. Cut the lespedeza up and set it on to cook with
soda ash for a couple of hours before bedtime.
8-2-02
Cooking did nothing to soften the lespedeza stalks, only changed them from green
to a deep brown. I should have used lye. Stubborn person that I am, I rinsed
the stalks and put them back on to cook again with soda ash. This plant is
tough by August and should have been harvested well before now. **It’s
interesting how things creep up on us and we accept the consequences as norm.
Case in point — my plant clippers. I’ve been using an ancient pair of gardening
clippers. No telling how long they’ve been around and no telling what or how
much they have cut. There is a major knick toward the back of the mouth that
indicates one of the things was wire. “Dull as a froe” comes to mind. I didn’t
realize just
how
dull they were or how much difference sharp clippers would make to my hands till
I purchased new clippers this morning and tried them on the trumpet vines.
**Emptied the lespedeza out of the cooking pot and rinsed. It’s till tough as
whet leather, but I’ll decide what to do about it later. Cut up and cooked the
trumpet vine.
8-3-02
Beat and pulled the trumpet vine pulp. The pulp, even though fairly fibrous,
drains through the screen very, very slowly. The contradiction comes because of
the bast fibers which are very fine and slow the draining.
Trumpet vine makes good paper
and is only slightly boring. The
bleached vine paper is a lovely
yellowish cream. **Have you ever cooked a plant, then stood wondering whether
you should work it up or simply toss it on the compost heap before you waste any
more time with it? This morning I was at the coin tossing stage with the
lespedeza, and if the color hadn’t been so promising, it might have been “tails,
you lose.” Given the cooked stem’s chocolate color, It obviously wasn’t going
to make tan paper, but given the toughness of the stems, it also obviously
wasn’t going to process in the beater without some breaking down first. If it
were put into the beater’s tub in its present state, it would only sink to the
bottom and constant stirring would be necessary. I’m not fond of “pre blending”
plant materials, particularly with large quantities, but I dug out the dedicated
kitchen blender and sent the stems for a round through it, enough to break them
down so they would circulate in the Critter. It wasn’t as hard as I’d feared
and the results from the blender were interesting. The bast was a lovely
chocolate that separated from the stalks into fine fibers, while the stalks
broke down into heavier, lighter colored fibers. I have a feeling that Korean
lespedeza bast paper would be outstanding, but gathering and processing are too
labor intensive to find out. Ended up underbeating the lespedeza on purpose.
When I checked the pulp an hour and a half, it looked too interesting to process
any further. The
lespedeza paper is visually outstanding.
The fine darker bast fibers provide a solid paper base for the very much heavier
stem fibers. It’s really a case of “lespedeza bast paper with lespedeza stem
inclusions,” since the stems were not broken down enough to hydrate and bind.
Makes little difference. The bast fiber is present in sufficient quantity to
form the actual paper. Both the
bast and the stems bleached out to cream,
so the color contrast between the two is lost. Best to leave this one
unbleached. **Through the years I’ve been delightfully amused to see little old
ladies in housedresses out in their front yards, scissors in hand, cutting away
at the weeds. This morning while I was sitting on the bank beside the driveway,
scissors in hand, harvesting broomsedge, I thought, “You know, I really should
cut those little old housedressed ladies a bit more slack. They might be
trimming weeds to make paper.” Cooked the broomsedge for 2.5 hours and beat it
for 2 hours.
The paper is green and highly figured,
yet can be pulled very thin, and definitely not as coarse as it might appear
from the picture.
Bleaching removes the green,
but still leaves an interesting paper. Paper from beaten broomsedge is far
better than that done in a blender. (FWIW, broomsedge cooking water yields a
gold dye. This jpg is a handful of
white cotton rag pulp dyed with broomsedge.)
Back to the top
8-4-02
Because of the hot weather, I’m way behind pulling test sheets from recent
beatings. Spent the early morning pulling paper until it became too hot to be
outside. I had three bleached pulps to do:
agrimony,
trumpet vine and
Korean lespedeza. I had bleached
very little of the agrimony pulp. The unbleached agrimony paper
is far too pretty and the plant is far too hard to come by to ruin by bleaching
into a color that can be obtained from many, if not most plants. Someone has
written to ask why I bleach pulp. Several reasons, curiosity being one of
them. I want to know so that I can to catalog that among the plant’s
properties. The majority of them time, plants bleach out to some form of cream,
but occasionally there are surprises, like the black flecks in the bleached blue
fescue or the parchment-like property of bleached Kentucky bluegrass. Too, for
the most part bleached pulps are better for writing on and running through the
printer than unbleached, and so make better stationery. Bleaching also allows
me to mix pulps that I couldn't otherwise because of their colors.
8-5-02 It
was time to cut back the Shasta daisies, and the stems went into the pot, then
into the beater. Shasta daisy makes a very fine pulp and
the paper is a thin, very pale olive with dark
flecks that are probably the nubs of
dead leaves. It
bleaches out to a clean cream.
Makes a very nice, smooth paper that can be pulled quite thin.
8-7-02
Played basket teacher for the last couple of days. While I taught, I made a
basket from daylily and round reed.
But I’m still a papermaker at heart. I kept looking at the #2 round reed and
thinking, “This is nothing but rattan, a plant...a plant that will make
paper???” So I took the leftovers and a hank of old reed that had lost its
body, cut that up in 1” pieces and cooked it for a couple of hours, then dropped
that in the beater. I had several problems, most of them of my own making, but
I suspect that cooking longer or cooking in lye would have solved part of the
problems I experienced. Even after all the beatings of different materials that
I have done, I still have trouble gauging amounts. The general rule for my size
beater is 1.25 pounds, but that is a
general rule,
a guideline, because the various fibers work differently in the beater for
diverse reasons. Reed, it turns out, is one of those devilishly different
materials. The fibers were quiet soft and squishy when they came out of the
cooking pot, and the beater flattened and separated them quite nicely. However,
I had put too much in the beater and
had to take quite a bit out.
Then the remainder of the fibers wanted to cling to each other and form mats
which stopped circulation. And I had something happen that I’ve never had
happen before. The fibers came out from under the drum highly aerated and
floated on top of the water rather than being dispersed evenly throughout it.
During beating I went on about my business, but the lack of sound from the
Hollander would bring me back when the circulation stopped. Made for an
interesting couple of hours. And the reed still sits in the beater. It’s not
done, but I’m too stubborn to give up on it. I want to know what the paper will
look like and I’ll find out tomorrow. It better be good.
8-8-02
Well...it’s not, and it’s definitely not worth dealing with the multiple
problems that occurred during beating. But to back up, when I kicked the beater
on this morning, the same problem of floating, aerated mats still existed. I
suppose it unrealistic to dream those would magically disappear overnight. I
pulled all the fiber out of the tub and plopped it back in a pot on the wild
chance that cooking it more would eliminate the problem. Surprising, it did.
The reed finished beating in an hour without any more attention from me. Fine,
but when I drained the pulp, the yield was terrible, and it was doubly terrible
considering the yield for time/labor. There is very little difference in color
between
unbleached and bleached reed (rattan) paper
(bleached is on the bottom). The paper is somewhat soft with no crispness.
This material has gone on my “do not do again” list. **Late afternoon was cool
enough for a trip to the Artisan Center site. Gathered Johnsongrass and found
and cut another bunch of agrimony.
Back to the top
8-9-02 I
had done Johnsongrass in November of last year and was thrilled with the results
(
unbleached
and
bleached).
Done in a kitchen blender, it made a lovely, crisp paper with amazing tear
strength, but I’d never run the plant through a Hollander. From the results
today, I have a feeling it is one of those fibers that is better off done in the
blender, though it’s possible that had I beaten it longer, the paper would have
come closer in appearance and quality to that done last year. Cut and cooked
the Johnsongrass for a couple of hours in soda ash, then put it in the beater,
where I only ran it for 30 minutes. Fiber length should have been a clue that
it could/should have been beaten longer, but it pulled easily enough. The
paper is a deep green
(which I’m sure will fade) with delicate figuring. It can be pulled very thin.
The
bleached paper
was the disappointment. I was hoping for a whiter paper, such as last year’s,
but this is closer to a gold. The fibers are considerably more apparent in the
bleached sheet, giving the paper a rough appearance, though the paper is
actually quite smooth. **Last spring while I was at the state capital, the
linden trees lining the street were being trimmed. When I tested the butt end
of a branch, the bark stripped easily. One of the workmen kindly allowed me to
drag off a couple of branches. The stripped bast has been sitting in my garage
since then, and it spoke to me this afternoon. Since I had harvested only
enough to allow me to determine whether it would be feasible to work with the
material, cutting, cooking and blending took little time. The fibers broke down
in less than an hour and processed into a slick, slimy pulp. Yield per amount
cooked was surprisingly good, however the quality would have been improved by
either cooking or processing longer. It’s almost too fibrous to be called
paper. Still, the
linden bast made a lovely sheet.
**Cut up the agrimony and set it on to cook so it would be ready for tomorrow.
8-10-02
Set the agrimony on to beat, then tackled the problem of what to do with the
pail of reed pulp. Throwing it out on the compost heap would have been a waste,
but given the soft quality of the paper, I had no desire to pull any more sheets
from it. The day was still, hot and sunny, so the thought occurred to use it up
pulling a big sheet. The large paper really requires a very fine fibered pulp,
but what the heck. If it made a sheet, fine; if it didn’t, fine. No loss. As
it turned out, the idea of a sheet from that pulp was a mistake, but one that
served a good purpose. I learned from it. It was as I thought, the pulp was
not fine fibered enough, and there were multiple thin spots and holes throughout
the sheet. As it was drying on the screen, the thought occurred that it might
be possible to “patch” those holes and thin spots. I had used up all of the
reed pulp, but there was a bag of very fine fibered bleached bluegrass pulp in
the crisper. Put a little of that in a bottle, shook it up well, then dribbled
the pulp/water mixture onto a hole. Put a mesh screen over that, pressed it
with a towel and, voila! Instant hole fix! But better than that, the repair
technique opens up other possibilities, such as writing or drawing on the paper
with contrasting colored pulp. Because there is no water above the screen, the
pulp does not “wander” as it does in the vat. This sheet was definitely not
visually pleasing unless
backlit, but
it served a good purpose. Something to follow up on when I have time.
8-11-02
Back last June I had gathered wool-grass down by the tracks in Old Town and
dried it. Today I cooked it up and processed it in the blender. Like all the
plants in the bulrush family that I’ve worked so far,
wool-grass yielded a brown paper.
I didn’t blend the cooled plant material into a featureless pulp, but rather,
just enough so the pulp would form a good sheet, leaving larger partially
blended fiber to float and make the paper more interesting. **Yesterday while
scraping around in the garage for the wool-grass, I found some redbud bast that
I had gathered in June at Jabez. Last night I set that on to soak and cooked it
up this afternoon, and it did look promising. When squeezed between my fingers,
the bast broke down lengthwise into fine fibers, and I’m almost certain that had
there been enough to beat in the Hollander, it would have made fine pulp.
However, there wasn’t that much, so I was forced to use the kitchen blender,
which made nothing but grit out of the bast. The resulting sludge is now on the
compost heap. If I can ever get enough redbud bast for the beater, I’ll
definitely try this one again. **Mixed the golden bleached Johnsongrass pulp
that I made a few days ago with the leftover linden bast, and I’m quite pleased
with the results. The
Johnsongrass/linden mixture
makes a lovely sheet.
Back to the top
8-12-02 I
had an opportunity to beat the eucalyptus sheets yesterday. It was an
interesting experience. The pulp is so white and so fine, you feel like you are
contaminating it each time you touched it. Even though I cleaned everything
beforehand – beater, draining equipment, mold/deckle, vat – the pulled sheets
still show occasional
evidence of every dark fibrous pulp I’ve worked
with in the last three months, and
there have been many. Eucalyptus is an interesting material and a bit
surprising. It’s very short fibered and the half-stuff sheets crumble
immediately into snowflakes in the beater tub, however, small chunks hugged the
bottom requiring occasional stirring. (This allowed the opportunity to notice
and pick out a few accidental dark fiber inclusions along the way. <sigh>) The
drained beaten pulp looks very similar to over beaten clean computer paper –
very dry with cottage cheesy clumps. It mixes quickly and easily in the vat.
Sheets pull so evenly and so smoothly that every flaw in the process of pulling
shows. If there is a stopped up hole in the screen, it will show. (This would
make an excellent pulp for watermarking.) If mold and deckle don’t fit
perfectly, the super fine fibers will creep under the edge and form alongside
the sheet
a very thin mat that does not look like
deckling, but
rather like very thin paper with a solid, though wavy, edge of its own. From
all of the above, I was expecting a soft sheet of paper when dry. Not so.
Exchange dried in a press, Eucalyptus yields a clean, crisp sheet with a very
smooth slick surface. Because it settles so flat and smooth on the screen and
drains so well, it’s easy to pull too thick a sheet. If the pulp on the screen
appeared to be too thin, the paper was the right thickness. Not sure that this
is a pulp that I’ll use by itself. It is entirely too perfect. Haven’t tried
it with intentional inclusions yet, but it should be outstanding with the deep
brown and yellow colors from a pinch of bulrush and straw.
8-13-02
When I dug up the Guild flowerbeds last month, there were many money plants.
(Sorry, that’s the only name I know for them.) I saved the silver dollar seed
disks, thinking they might be of use in the HMP. The eucalyptus pulp fairly
screamed for them on the outside of a card. Filled the vat and added only a
small amount of eucalyptus pulp so that pulling twice would yield a good sheet.
To that I added a pinch of olive wool-grass pulp and a pinch of the
reddish/brown agrimony. Pulled a thin sheet, carefully arranged two silver
dollar disks on the wet pulp, then pulled a second sheet over the first.
Worked
perfectly. (Love it when a plan actually comes together the way it is
envisioned!) Then water/pulp slid off the slick silver dollars, but caught on
the rim and the ends, binding those firmly to the pulp below.
The wool-grass/agrimony addition made a lovely
accent background for the silver dollars.
Pulled envelopes from the same mixture, then strained the vat and went back to
pure eucalyptus for the inside card. Makes
a
lovely set.
Normally, the envelope mold for this set works perfectly, but because the
eucalyptus pulp is so fine, there was a small amount of leakage between the mold
and deckle. This happened once before and I fixed it by adding a thin foam
strip on the underneath side of the deckle where the leakage occurred. I just
thought it had compacted needed replacing. (I really need to quit thinking.)
When I removed the foam and replace it, the leakage problem was multiplied
several times over, but I’ll have to wait about refixing it until the deckle
dries.
Back to the top
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8-14-02
I’ve been casting about for uses for the big sheets of paper. They’re pretty
just as they are, but still, they’re just sheets of paper. Folded, they make
lovely fans,
such as the 3’x4’ one from last November, but I’ve never taken time to poke
around in the gray matter for another use. Because the sheet I have in the
bedroom calls for backlighting to show off the fibers, I played around with the
idea of folding it into a double cone cover that could contain a light. It’s a
wonderful idea, but an engineering nightmare. To save wasting the big sheets,
the scaled down prototype is done with commercial paper. This is all well and
good, but sometimes reducing the size causes problems of its own. This
rough
prototype was
done with a large sheet of copy paper scaled down from 3’x7’ to 6”x14”. Either
the folds were too tiny or my fingers were too big, but I couldn’t get the folds
on either end to crease properly unless I creased across the center, something I
really don’t want to do on the large sheet. Really didn’t learn much from this
run at the idea. I’ll need to locate a larger sheet of paper to give it another
try.
8-16-02
Harvested the butterflyweed from the stalks whose leaves had dropped. (I’ve
seen only one Monarch this year. Such a shame!) I did paper from the
butterflyweed bast last October, and it’s outstanding, both in appearance and
quality, but it’s a pill to get the bast off the small stalks. Thought I would
take a portion of the harvested stalks and see what stalk and bast would do when
processed together. Removed the few leaves that were left, cut off the branched
ends and cut the stalks to 1” lengths. There were a bunch of seedpods, both
mature and immature, and those went in the pot as well. Cooked it for 3 hours
and processed in the beater for 2 hours, then bleached the pulp. Normally I
pull a few sheets before bleaching, but the color on this was so unpromising, I
didn’t bother. Can’t say that I’m thrilled with the paper. Oh, it’s
excellent paper as far as quality and even
appearance, but it comes in a very
poor second to the pure bast paper,
which is a lovely, fine fibered silvery white. The bast/stem/seedpod paper is a
heavy fibered gold because of the stalk, with chopped seed inclusions. On its
own, it is pretty. It’s only when comparison comes into effect that it is
diminished. This is likely something I’ll not do again. Steamed the rest of
the stalks and stripped the bast for drying.
8-17-02
Found a larger sheet of commercial paper and gave the folding another try. Was
able to scale it 1:2, so this one is half the size of the proposed piece.
This prototype,
though still very rough, was considerably easier to work with because of the
increased size. I know now that the idea of folding the double cone without the
folds crossing the center of the piece will work, at least with this particular
paper. As to whether the whole idea will work with the physical properties of
the big sheet is another matter. The big sheet may not be crisp enough or tough
enough to hold up to the strain imposed on it in folding and hanging. And now
I’m stuck for a way to manage the light inside. Initially, I had in mind using
a ring made of copper wire or copper tubing to lace through the folds at the top
and bottom. That would provide an attachment the light, but the copper isn’t
going to work. Both prototypes are laced with waxed linen, and that, or
something similar, is what I’ll have to use on the full scale version. I have a
feeling this whole idea is going to be way too fragile to be practical. That’s
not going to stop me from trying, but I’m beginning to think that I’m wasting
time.
8-23-02
The big paper is still on hold. Too many good plants out there going to waste.
For some time I’ve wanted to try kudzu, but the opportunity just never presented
itself until my husband and I were returning from vacation today. There, beside
a major four lane highway, was a 40’ rock wall covered in the stuff spilling
onto the right-of-way. Of course, the rock wall was on the wrong side,
necessitating a U-turn, but I was at the wheel with an understanding husband
riding shotgun. I offered to let him stay in the van and pretend he didn’t know
me, but he opted to get out and take pictures instead. I only harvested the
last 15’ or so of the vines, thinking that these might be more tender. I
stripped the bast from some of the larger diameter vines, and it comes off
easily without steaming, but only from one joint to the next. It is thick
enough to justify trying alone at some point, but this batch of vines was
processed stem, bast and all. After cooking for three hours in soda ash, the
stems crushed very easily by hand, but the “bark” outside the bast had turned to
a green goo that had to be rinsed off before beating. Putting the cooked stems
in a wire strainer and turning the hose on them full force removed it easily
enough, though it took time sifting and turning the stems so all of them
received the force of the water. Set the Hollander up and beat the kudzu for
two hours before bedtime.
Back to the top
8-24-02
Kicked the beater on again this morning and ran it another two hours before
testing the pulp. I suspect that three hours would have been sufficient,
because the pulp drained very slowly through the screen. The
unbleached kudzu actually makes a very
interesting sheet of paper, a pale
green with light fibers snaking and twisting across it. Though I’m not certain,
my guess is that these lighter fibers are the bast. The paper rattles nicely
and sheets can be pulled quite thin, not at all coarse.
Kudzu
bleached out to a stock standard cream,
and I’m not as pleased with it as I am the unbleached. The lovely light colored
snaking fibers disappear into the cream background and the paper loses most of
its charm. Kudzu is best used unbleached. **Before we left on vacation, I had
done a non-gathering exploration of the Artisan Center site and found a nook in
the woods I’d not visited before. There were several plants there that I’d not
seen growing elsewhere. A trip back there this evening yielded what appears to
be a
nodding bur-marigold
and pigweed. I had intended to gather umbrella sedge, but by the time I got
around to it, I was too hot and itchy to think about anything but a shower. I
had harvested only the youngest, most tender pigweed, but I was still afraid to
cook it without taking the meat tenderizer to it first. In the field the
pigweed had been quickly knife trimmed of leaves, seed tufts and the soft end so
the stalks could be tied more easily, and I intended to finish the job later.
However, once home there didn’t seem to be that many seed tufts left, so I just
left them. Hand beat the stalks with a meat tenderizer, cut and cooked them for
two hours. Turned the pot off at bedtime and left it. I’ll check in the
morning to see if it needs additional cooking.
8-25-02
Cooked the pigweed another hour just to make sure it was soft enough. (Stalks
sometimes fool me. If I can mash the largest of them easily with the back of a
spoon, then pull the fibers apart lengthwise with my fingers, I assume they’re
done. That test usually works, but sometimes it fails me, perhaps because there
were tougher stalk parts hiding in the bottom of the pot, not willing to take
part in the test.) The tiny black seeds that has been in the remaining stalk
tuffs had cooked out and were quite obvious in the bottom of the pot. The
thought occurred that they might be nice in the paper, so I washed the pigweed
well in a paint strainer, rather than a wire strainer, to prevent losing them.
The stalks beat up in the Hollander in 1.5 hours into a pleasantly smooth pulp
for one made from stalks. The
unbleached
pigweed paper is a pale tan salted
throughout with poppy-like seeds. The quality is good. However the
bleached pigweed is more striking,
a cream that makes a lovely base for the black seeds. Definitely a keeper.
8-26-02
Stripped the leaves from the nodding bur-marigold. Broke a few stalks to check
them out, and found that this is definitely going to be tougher than the
pigweed. Many of the stalks were small in diameter, but smaller did not equate
more tender. Sheesh! Tough little rascals! Beat all of them, large and small,
well with the meat tenderizer, cut and cooked them for 4.5 hours. Beating took
4 hours before the pulp was smooth. The green stalks had a few dark areas
scattered up and down them, and these translated into dark flecks throughout the
paper.
Unbleached bur-marigold paper
is a pale olive flecked with various shades of brown.
Bleaching changed the background to cream,
but did not lighten the dark flecks. The paper is lightly fibrous, smooth and
can be pulled quite thin. Good paper but a lot of time/work to get from plant
to paper.
8-27-02
Before I left on vacation, Allen Roberts from Arkansas, wrote to ask if I’d
tried cattail heads. That was on my “wanna do but haven’t had time” list.
Allen’s note prompted me to find time. Gathered seven nice, plump, solid
heads. Stripping the fluff is not something you want to do inside or outside on
a windy day. The seven heads yielded an amazing amount of cream colored, silky,
flyaway fluff, enough to fill the cooking pot 2/3 full. After being wet down,
this shrank to 1/3 and turned a deep rust color. Cooked the fiber for 1 hour in
soda ash and ran it through the kitchen blender for 30 seconds, turning it into
a super smooth, slick pulp. The seven heads yielded a little over a half
gallon. I’m not quite sure how to describe the
cattail
head paper to convey how unique it
is. The smooth pulp made a paper that has much of the feel and texture of
embossed pigskin, smooth, yet rough. The sheets can be pulled quite thin. When
pressed and dried, the paper is heavy...not heavy/thick, but rather, the weight
of the paper is heavy in your hand even when the sheet is very thin. The paper
is limp like thin leather, looks like leather, feels like leather and is tough
as leather. Well, not exactly. After all, this
is
paper, but the tear strength is quite good. This is definitely a plant material
to be done again. Very interesting. Haven’t bleached it yet to see what that
will yield. One note to remember — these cattail heads were fresh and solid,
not shedding. Don’t know what older heads might yield.
Back to the top
8-28-02
Curiosity got the best of me first thing. I bleached cattail head pulp, pulled
several test sheets, pressed them and put them in the cardboard dryer. Later I
thought that I don’t know what the texture or appearance of this paper would be
dried any other way. Really should try air drying just to see, but I’d already
cleaned out the vat when I thought about that. Perhaps another day. The
bleached cattail head paper
has the tactile properties of the unbleached, but is cream with thousands of
teeny tiny rust/brown flecks in each sheet that form the raised texture. The
overall effect is a lighter colored paper than the unbleached, but far from just
cream colored. **The leaves on the gayfeather plants in the flower garden are
beginning to die back from the bottom. Though they aren’t large, there are
many, many of them on each plant. Since they’re parallel veined, they should
make paper and I’ve been wanting to try the stalks anyway. It might be possible
to get two papers from this one plant. The leaves and a few of the seed pods
stripped easily enough and I put them on to cook in soda ash. Realized I might
have problems when I checked the pot at 35 minutes. The central veins in the
leaves were not done, and I didn’t expect them to be, but the leaf parts on
either side of the vein were tender. Cooking longer to tenderize the central
vein would have rendered the rest of the leaf to mush, so I turned the pot off
at that point and rinsed the fibers well. Rather than use the beater, I
processed the plant material in the kitchen blender for 20 seconds. This beat
the well cooked part of the leaf into a fine pulp and broke the central vein
down into fine, stringy fibers. It was interesting to see how many seeds had
made it into the pulp. Not a problem, but it surprised me. The paper is
interesting,
full of various fine fibers and seeds,
but the pulp fooled me. It looks thick on the screen, but is in fact, too
thin. Each of the sheets I pulled has a few fine pinholes. Draining time was
slow, even with the thin sheets, so I hate to think what it would be pulling
thicker sheets to get rid of the pinholes. May fool around with this pulp again
tomorrow, mixing something else with it.
8-29-02 I
had the gayfeather stalks to deal with this morning. I’ve found that if summer
hardened stalks are beaten with a meat tenderizer before cooking, it greatly
shortens the time in the pot. These were definitely summer hardened. Even
after beating, cooking still took four hours and the cooked stalked had to be
run through the kitchen blender for 20 seconds before going into the beater.
Tough stuff. Gayfeather stalks are a curious material to beat, too. Though the
material was quite fine enough to run under the drum without jamming, it still
wasn’t fine enough to circulate well on its own. I found it hiding on the
bottom of the tub. Fine. I know how to deal with that. One 4”x6” piece of
abaca added to the water solved that circulation problem for the most part
However, the plant material still wanted to sink at the intake. Sitting with it
and stirring occasionally solved that after fifteen minutes or so. A half hour
later, the pulp developed a dead spot beside alongside the return about level
with the drum. Stirring that every fifteen minutes or so kept the pulp
reasonably well mixed. On top of all that, this pulp is one of those that
collects and packs alongside the drum. I don’t know why some pulps do that and
some never do. A mystery, but one I’m not going to solve, just deal with. I
let the gayfeather stalks beat for four hours before shutting the machine down.
I’ll decide tomorrow whether to beat longer. **While the Hollander was running,
I mixed some of the bleached cattail head pulp with yesterday’s gayfeather leaf
pulp that had pulled too thin. It was amazing that the small amount of cattail
that I used so dramatically increased the weight of the paper, but didn’t change
its appearance. It did alter the texture, though, to that of pigskin.
Interesting, but not especially pleasant in a dark forest green paper. **Fixed
the envelope deckle that I’d screwed up earlier this month. Solved the problem
by just making another. I had wasted enough time attempting repairs. Sometimes
starting fresh is the best way.
8-30-02
The gayfeather pulp was quite usable after four hours of beating, but just out
of curiosity, I let it beat another hour. That decision was encouraged by the
fact that everything, by this point, was working without supervision. The
resulting paper was outstanding in quality, but not especially thrilling in
appearance. Nothing really wrong with it, just nothing to distinguish it from
multiple other plant fiber papers.
Unbleached gayfeather paper is a
very pale tan with a hint of olive. There are shiny fiber highlights on the
surface and a few dark flecks scattered throughout. The
bleached paper is cream
with the same characteristics. **Drove down to Old Town and gathered cattail
heads and bulrush. On the way home, I stopped on 1016 to check on wool-grass,
cattails and umbrella sedge I’d seen growing in a wet area beside the ambulance
service. Didn’t know who owned the land, but when I went into the ambulance
service to see if they knew, I got the typical soft slow southern response.
“Well...lemme see…. Now, that would be...lessee...ol’ Doc Blackman...naw,
that’s not right...Blackburn. Yeah...that’s right, ol’ Doc Blackburn. Real
reputable physician, real well known. Him and his wife moved up to Louisville
long time ago, set up a practice there. His wife used to be head of nursing
here, run the whole hospital. Place like to have fell apart when they moved.
It’s a real mystery why they left in the first place. All a her folks and all a
his live here. Never understood it. Saw him a couple of years back at his
momma’s funeral. He was lookin’ good, like Louisville agreed with him. They’ll
probably move back when he retires, no tellin’ when that’ll be, though. Folks
come from all over the world for him to treat ’em. He’s a real doctor...”
Please believe me, this went further and would have gone further still, except I
interrupted to ask if he thought the doctor would mind if I harvested some of
the weeds. “Well...no...I don’t see as how he’d mind a bit. Probably like the
idea that someone was takin’ an interest in the place and what was growin’
there. Like I said, maybe him and his wife will move back here someday. I’m
figuring they’ll build….” I edged toward the door, thanked him and made my
escape. Harvested a few cattails for later this week and a good sampling of
umbrella sedge for tomorrow.
8-31-02
Separated the sedge stalks from the leaves and heads and discarded the stalks.
After a couple of rough experiences, I’ve learned not to cook stalks and tender
leaves together. I could have cooked the stalks in a net bag along with the
leaves, then cooked them longer when the leaves were done, but I didn’t have
enough to fool with. Cooked the leaves for an hour and washed them thoroughly
with the hose. The cooking water had a very distinct cherry color to it, and I
thought it might make a dye, but I failed to save any to find out. Ran the
cooked plants through the blender for 30 seconds and made a very dark olive
green mushy pulp, which still had some small pieces of leaves. The pulp drained
slowly and formed a good sheet. Umbrella sedge is a pale green plant, but as
I’ve noticed with so many water loving plants, the
sedge made
a very dark paper, a lovely olive
brown. It is so uniformly dark that the leaf pieces are not prominent.
Bleaching produces a striking gold parchment like paper
highlighted with the unbleached pieces of leaves floating throughout it.
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