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5-1-03 Pulled sheets from the
hyacinth bean pulp cooked yesterday. Sometimes, pulp that contains both
bast and stem can be problematical. If you've beat the material long
enough to fray and hydrate the stem material, you've overbeaten the bast.
That may be the case with this pulp. To outward appearances, the pulp is
coarse, when in fact, it is composed of superfine bast pulp with larger, though
very soft, pieces of stem. Because the bast is overbeaten, the pulp drains
slowly, though still within reason. The
test sheets from the hyacinth bean
vine are not especially eye appealing, but the quality of the paper is
excellent -- crisp, thin, smooth. I'll pull several sheets from this for
books, then bleach the remaining pulp. **This afternoon I went out to the
Indian Fort Theater to help Charlie gather honeysuckle that she intends to use
in basketmaking classes. While we were there, the papermaking side of me
kicked in. I found a mulberry tree I could harvest, as well as some curly
dock stalks. About halfway into the honeysuckle gathering (during which
time I was probably cutting as much curly dock as honeysuckle), Charlie
straightened up, put her hands on her hips and said rather resentfully, "Y'know
what? You're flat ruined as a basketmaker."
5-2-03 Went down to Silver
Creek to harvest curly dock I'd found three or four days ago. Curly
dock? What curly dock? The ever efficient city maintenance
department, whose salary I pay through my taxes, had bushhogged the field flat.
So much for that.
5-3-03 I am back in long pants
and winter socks and not happy about it.
Too cold and wet to harvest plants or fool with paper. Instead, I
opt for making punch cradles and molds and deckles. Come March of next
year, I'll be teaching papermaking from plants and bookbinding in Ohio at the Midwest
Basketry Focus - an Alternative Conference. I'll be using the
cradles and paper equipment at that conference.
5-4-03 Yet more rain and more
inside work. The rectangular pieces of blueboard that came from the
centers of the deckles I made yesterday are too inviting to waste, and they're the perfect size
for butterfly deckles. Swallowtails are my favorite,
unfortunately. I say unfortunately because that's what I made,
a swallowtail deckle with two
lovely, slender tails. I would have been far better off to have made
Monarchs. No tails. Oh, including the tails makes a lovely butterfly, but
they are so slender that couching is a problem. The pulp adheres to
the deckle across the tails' width and comes up with the deckle when it is
removed. A q-tip solved that problem, but taking care with the tails made
pulling slow. The swallowtail paper is a lovely shape, though, and I'd like to make a mobile
in different sizes from various plant papers. Balancing them is a problem
I have yet to work through. I have several ideas. such as
weighting the paper by using
dowels for bodies, but each idea has its drawbacks. Something will
work out, I'm sure.
5-5-03 At least 10 of the
Monarch eggs that were laid on my butterflyweed hatched. The
larva are busily munching away,
sometimes 2 and 3 to a plant, and I
have yet to find a place to relocate them. If I don't find milkweed
somewhere soon, I'll sacrifice my plants. but that doesn't mean I'm happy about
it. **Stopped by Dresser Instruments and asked for permission to harvest
plants around the perimeter of the grounds.
Back to the top
5-7-03 Caught a break in the
rain and drove over to Dresser. It's only a couple of blocks, but the
weather radar said "drive, the break isn't that big." All manner of both
curly and common dock grows alongside a small shady bluff-like area, and the
plants are huge. The curly dock has formed stalks that are just beginning
to show tiny flowerheads at their tops. The common dock, which will bloom
later, still hugs the ground. Some of the plants had 15-18 stalks that
were four or more feet tall. Lovely stuff! I harvested about
60 stalks and made it back to the
van just in time to beat the rain. In the garage I stripped the leaves
from the stalks and saved the leaf stem (minus the leaf) to cook up separately
later. The fall
curly dock leaf stems made lovely sheets, but I don't know what these,
gathered in the spring, will do. The chipper grinder took less than two
minutes to shred the stalks.
Last year when I processed dock, I drove the van up and down over the stalks
trying to crush them. Much easier with the shredder, and I don't
feel like a fool. (As an aside, I have a feeling that this will be an
excellent way of processing green plant material that I want to dry for later
use.) Cooked the dock in soda ash for three hours and will process it in
the Hollander tomorrow. Someone asked how green stalks make
rose brown paper. The red is
obviously present in both the leaves and
the stalks, but I suspect
that it is brought out by a reaction with the soda ash, not by the cooking
alone. I dropped some of the crushed stalk into clear boiling water and no
color change occurred. It was only after I added soda ash that the change
came about.
5-8-03 While the curly dock
stalks were on cooking and while I was pulling the bleached hyacinth vine pulp
and while roast was in the oven for lunch, the dock leaf stems were cooking on
the porch.
(I am a master at multitasking. Wrong. The roast was definitely well
done.)
The bleached hyacinth bast isn't anything outstanding, but it's decent paper,
considering that the vines over wintered outside and were gray with mildew.
The dock leaf stems made the same lovely sheets that
the late winter leaves did.
Note: I did not refer to this as paper, because it truly isn't.
The leaf stems are cooked, then placed in a paint strainer bag and washed under
the full power of a garden hose sprayer. The stems are so tender that the force
of the water separates them into strands. This "pulp" will pull into sheets that hold
together well enough, but the sheets when dry are basically compressed, unprocessed
fibers. The pulp does need to be used up, not stored, because
the purple bleeds out into the water and the fibers lose much of their color. By the
time I'd finished with that and emptying the beater, there was no time to pull
the dock.
5-9-03 Arrggghhh! This
morning when I put the first handful of dock pulp in the vat, I knew what I'd
done...or rather, what I'd failed to do...yesterday. I didn't check the
dead spots in the beater tub, and the pulp was full of unbeated pieces of stalk.
I always check, but yesterday, I didn't. Everything was circulating
so well, I simply forgot. There was no way to fish the chunks of unbeaten
stalk out of the pulp, but rather than throw it away, I pulled sheets. As
it turned out, they were okay.
The stalks were "soft cooked" and smoothed out flat in the press.
Actually, the sheets are rather nice when
backlit. Still, the
chunks aggravate me. This is an excellent plant for papermaking. The
tear strength of the sheets approaches that of hemp. I really want perfect
pulp out of it, so I'll likely do this again in the next few days.
5-10-03 About a third of the
chunky pulp was still left this morning, so I bleached it. It turns a
lovely very pale cream. I used it to pull two-sided paper, using the
bleached pulp for a thin base, then pulled curly dock leaf stem pulp over the
top of that. The combination made a striking sheet. I accidentally
dropped a papermaker's tear on one sheet, and the result was so pleasing, I
dribbled water across the whole
sheet. While lovely, two-sided sheets present a problem if the pulps
used for the two sides do not have the same properties. These sheets of
stalk pulp and leaf stem pulp are a good example. They will curl and cup,
no matter how flat they are dried. There was still a little pulp left after that, so I pulled
extremely thin sheets of the bleached pulp with the leaf stems as inclusions.
This is a 2"x3" swatch.
Back to the top
5-11-03 After yet another
storm this morning (we've had something like 12" of rain in the last 7 days), I gathered about a hundred stalks of dock down at Dresser.
Stripped the leaves and ran the stalks through the chipper. Cooked half of
it (this time, with the help of
my assistant, regularly checking the dead spots in the tub) and dried the other half.
The shredded stalks dried in just a few
hours, though I'll put them back out again tomorrow to make sure all the
moisture is out. Curly dock stalks have a non-fibrous interior, and this
cooks up into gunk, which must be washed out before the plant material is put
into the beater. I do this by placing the
cooked gunky plant material in
a wire strainer and spraying hard it with a hose. The gunk washes out and
leaves the clean, fibrous stalk
material. Daylight disappeared before I could empty the beater, but It
will be there in the morning.
5-12-03 The Monarch
caterpillars were absolutely decimating my butterflyweed plants, stripping the
leaves and cutting the top blossoms off. I grabbed a bucket, picked off 67
of the fat little rascals, and relocated them to the area opposite the Artisan
Center site where there are real, hones-to-gosh milkweed plants for them to
consume at will.
5-13-03 The curly dock was
perfectly beaten this time with no included bits and pieces. I'm truly
impressed with this plant. Even though the natural color isn't
spectacular, the pulp produces a
smooth, clear and extremely tough paper. I
bleached the remaining pulp
and pulled a few sheets to
have for the records, then played around with
embedding leaves in 10 or 12
sheets and pulled 24 sheets of tissue thin dock with leaf stem inclusions.
**Last winter Frances Groves sent me some Spanish moss, but I had to wait till
spring before doing anything with it. I've seen it used as an inclusion in
paper, but had never seen or heard of it being cooked up, processed and pulled
for sheets. Now I know why. In the dry state, Spanish moss has a
gray outside covering over a dark brown, threadlike core. When cooked,
this gray coating turns a deep olive green. In the blender, it comes off
the core and turns into green, fiberless goo. (Peter Hopkins says the
technical papermaker's term for this is "gunk"). Swimming inside that gunk
were the fine, brown, threadlike fibers. The proportion of gunk to brown
threads was about 9:1 in favor of the gunk. If this were washed out, there
would be next to nothing left, and I wasn't about to introduce the gunk/threads
into a good fiber as an inclusion. What to do? I wasn't about it
pitch it, so...I pulled sheets of
gunk and threads. The odd pulp pulled and couched with no trouble,
other than being a bit slow about draining. Mind you, this isn't paper,
just compressed and dried gunk, but it's a rather pretty novelty sheet.
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5-17-03 The KGAC Spring Fair
is this weekend. I'm doing volunteer work there, not exhibiting, and of
course, it's raining. What else is new? **The curly dock was
outstanding for paper, so I'm interested in how common dock, a very close
cousin, compares to it.
Left the show between showers and gathered 100 stalks of the common dock.
Just out of curiosity, I timed gathering, stripping and chopping. It took
ten minutes to cut, gather together and tie up 100 stalks. When I got home
it took 40 minutes to strip the leaves. (This would have taken far less
time if I had not been saving the stems from the first three leaves of each
stalk.) It took 2 minutes to run the stalks through the chipper, and the
stalks yielded approximately two 4 gallon cookings (two beater loads). If
I had had my wits about me, I wouldn't have chipped all the stalks immediately, but
rather, let them dry a few days. As it was, they were full of water, and
the chipped material is sopping wet. Did I say it is raining? Did I
mention that the forecast for the next three days is rain? I had planned
on drying half of the chopped stuff, and now I have to worry about it souring.
(For information's sake -- common dock matures slightly later than curly dock.
It has a broader smoother leaf, particularly on the upper part of the plant.
Other than that, the two plants are very similar in appearance.)
5-19-03 The forecast was
wrong. Today (Monday) was delightfully sunny, so I spread half the dock
shards out on a sheet to begin drying. Good thing. The bottom of the
bin that held them was covered with water that had drained out of the stalks.
Amazing! **Cooked the other half of the stalks for three hours in soda
ash. Either common dock processes in the beater more quickly than curly
dock or the plants were more tender. Either way, the beating only took 2
hours. And now I know that there no noticeable difference between common
dock and curly dock. Both plants make the same crisp, smooth and tough
paper. I haven't processed the leaf stems yet, but I don't expect any real
difference there, either.
5-21-03 An incident happened today that
underlines how firmly my mind is locked into papermaking, often to the exclusion
of other more worldly things. Earlier today I trimmed the privet hedge
and, naturally, as a papermaker, I checked it as a source for fiber and rejected
it. That is standard operating procedure, not the incident that I refer
to. Hot and tired after trimming, I came in for a break before cleaning up
my mess and lamented to my husband about the huge pile of trimmings on the
ground, how difficult it is to cram the stems into bags for disposal.
Without a pause, he asked why not use the chipper/grinder to shred them. I
sat there with a blank look on my face, fumbling for an answer. Using the
machine for any purpose beyond papermaking had never occurred to me.
5-23-03 Cooked up the common dock stems this
morning, but I'm a bit disappointed in the results compared to the curly dock.
They lack much of the purple coloration and strong floating white fibers that
make curly dock leaf stems so striking. I pulled a few sheets of
cotton rag with the stems
included, but as I said, they're a far cry from curly dock.
Back to the top
5-27-03 Rain has kept me from doing much over
the past few days. Today the forecasters promised sunshine, and the sun
did break through about 9 AM. I have a project in mind, three "flying
saucers" similar to this one, but
in graduated sizes and hanging one under the other from large at the top to
small at the bottom. Because the sheets for the pieces such as the
pictured double cone need to be rather thick, they aren't pulled, they're poured.
I'll share that my method for pouring came out of pure ignorance several years
ago when I first began making paper. I had heard the terms "pulling" and
"pouring." I understood pulling well enough, but I simply assumed that
pouring was just that -- pouring onto a screen -- and out of ignorance, that's
just what I did. I poured onto an open screen with no frame and with
nothing underneath. It took some playing around with the pulp/water ratio to figure out how to pour
a reasonably even sheet, though the thickness varies considerably compared to a
properly poured sheet. Yet, with practice, the proper pulp and careful
overlapping, it's possible to pour a thick
sheet this way. And if a thick sheet is needed, it's a reasonable way to do it.
Today I wanted a 20"x44" sheet for
the top saucer. I put hyacinth vine pulp in a 5 gallon bucket, then
turned the hose on it to thin and break up any clumps. This is then poured
onto the screen. (It's necessary to have the screen on a slanted surface
and begin pouring at the top, working downward.) While pouring, there will
be thick spots and thin spots. After completing the entire sheet, I thin
the remaining pulp in the bucket and pour that gently over any thin spots,
which smoothes the sheet out. The zigzag line down the middle is papyrus, which
was poured last. After the entire sheet is poured, repoured and decorated,
another screen is placed over that, and the sheet is
blotted with a towel until no more
water comes out. At that point, I spray the sheet with about a half-cup of
undiluted Argo laundry starch, then move the screen and sheet to a dry area.
Normally, I'll let this dry until the edges just begin to curl, then move inside
and place upside down to finish drying. However, at lunchtime the skies
darkened and...yup, a sudden thunderstorm, then another and another rolled
through. I grabbed the screen and pulled it into the kitchen, soggy as it
was, and there it
lies. I'm hoping no midnight muncher walks across it during a nighttime
raid on the refrigerator.
5-28-03 Hmmmm... Either drying the sheet
inside or the particular pulp I was using caused the sheet to
cup and warp far more than
usual. I've lightly misted the side of the sheet away from the screen,
flipped it over and placed a light fixture grid over the entire sheet as a
weight. We'll see if this corrects the cupping. I leave trim room
around the outsides of poured sheets, so even if it doesn't completely flatten, the sheet
will still be quite usable for
my purpose. For the middle saucer, I thought it would be neat to use the
papyrus pulp for the sheet and do the center decoration from the hyacinth vine
pulp. Doing that may have been a mistake, or rather two mistakes.
The papyrus pulp is very fine fibered, and the sheet may be thinner than I
really want. Also, in using more pulp to make it thicker, I've used all
the papyrus pulp I had and have nothing to decorate the smallest sheet.
Jolly. Three hours later... Okay, I solved one problem. The
papyrus sheet dried outside without cupping.
When it was dry, I trimmed the
excess from the edges, rehydrated the trimmings, and used that when I poured
the smallest sheet, which is drying now as I type...inside...because it is
raining yet again. Meanwhile, I checked the first sheet, and the cupping
was nicely corrected.
5-29-03 The smallest sheet cupped much like
the first one, and I spray damped it and placed it under the light grid with
books on top as weights. This flattened it nicely. Here is
a shot of all three. Only one,
the papyrus, sheet, has been trimmed, so the dimensions aren't accurate for the
smallest or largest. It's likely I'll take them down to Tourism tomorrow
to do the trimming, scoring and folding. There isn't a table here that's
large enough. Tourism won't mind me cluttering the place up with
papermaking stuff and the tourists always enjoy seeing a craftsman at work.
5-30-30 Spent a couple of hours at Tourism
this morning trimming and scoring
the sheets. Once the sheets are scored and gently folded, sewing holes
are punched about 1/2" down from the top along the two long sides. Before
sewing, the two short ends are glued. This is the
smallest cone scored, glued and
stitched, but not pulled into the double cone shape. After all three
were formed into the cones or flying saucers, I hung
one beneath the other. I'm
not satisfied with the distance between the bottom cone and the one above it.
To be visually pleasing, I think the distance needs to be just a bit longer, but
I haven't taken time to correct it yet. I will eventually. **As a
side note about Tourism, I think that is the only business I know where
employees come in on their days off just to visit and use the phrase "I
get to work this weekend." Fun bunch, fine people. They also
make a mean pot of coffee.
5-31-03 Siberian iris leaves make an excellent
paper, but I've never done the stalks. This morning was spent harvesting
and cooking the stalks, along with their base leaves, from my two large plants.
Caesar seemed to think harvesting was a game designed expressly to amuse him.
He pounced each time I slid my hand down a stalk to cut it off. I have the
scratches to prove it. Removed the seedpods and ran the stalks through the
chipper, then cooked them for three hours in washing soda. The stalks were
marginally done at that point, but the leaves were overdone. Time was
becoming a factor, so I opted to wash the plant material and begin beating at
that point. Beating took three hours, so the stalks probably should have
been cooked longer, however, the pulp is smooth and fine. Didn't have time
to pull sheets, It was too cold and windy to do that, anyway.
Tomorrow's job...if it warms up and doesn't rain. **Quick note about
beating Siberian iris stalks. This plant material is one of those that
accumulate rapidly on the sides of the drum. It was necessary to stop the
beater and clean the drum more often that usual during beating.
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