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6-1-03 My intention this
morning was to pull the Siberian iris pulp, but two things happened. I
took a walk (which almost always alters my plans because I find new things to
play with), and then after I returned, serendipity occurred. On my walk I found
young (and what I mistakenly thought was tender) Joe-Pye weed, which I
harvested. At home, I separated the bast from the stalks and put that in a
mesh bag to be cooked at the same time, yet separate from the stalk. The
stalk cooked up in three hours, but the bast, surprisingly, was still big-time
tough. Normally, bast cooks more quickly that stalk material,, but that's
definitely not the case with this plant. Not sure what I'll do with either
the bast or the stalk yet. The bast needs more cooking, and there really
isn't enough of the stalk material alone for the beater. Set the bast on
to cook and what to do with bast/stalk will be problem for solving later.
**I turned my mind toward pulling iris pulp, and I mentioned, serendipity
happened. The last plant material I had in the vat was the disappointing
common dock leaf stems from 5/23. I am always good about emptying vats and cleaning up when I'm
through for the day...almost always good. For whatever
reason, I did not empty the vat that day, and then I became so busy with the
double cones that I left the vat sitting, full of water/pulp. Today, when
I went to empty it and clean up, low and behold, the fibers had changed color
and were showing the wine and red colors that were missing on the 23rd!
Oh, happy days! Now I know that waiting will allow the color to develop.
And not only did the color of the fibers in the vat change, but so did the
remaining pulp in the plastic bag, which I failed to put in the refrigerator.
Pulled 112 sheets with the leaf
stems as inclusions in a very thin bleached common dock slurry.
6-2-03 This morning there was still a
little of the common dock leaf stem pulp left, so I mixed that with bleached
hyacinth bean pulp and pulled six
large sheets to use later as flying saucers. **I finally got around
to pulling the Siberian iris
stalk pulp, and I'm not overly impressed with it. The fibers are
heavier than I like, though that could have been fixed by beating longer, but
the bigger problem is that there are "chunks" of material in the paper, and I
suspect beating longer wouldn't have done anything with them. They appear
to have come from the joint area between the stalk and the section that holds the
flower. The chunks are hard and fiberless. The
hindsight thing...I should have clipped the upper end off and discarded it.
Another problem is that the paper is rather drab. It's tan with flecks of
brown calyx material scattered throughout. The pulp drains properly, and
the sheets can be pulled surprisingly thin without having pinholes, but
still...I just don't care for it. Pulled enough sheets for my records and
some swatches, then bleached the rest. The bleached pulp is a lovely
pale yellow that will probably pull cream sheets. **Back to the Joe-Pye.
Both the cooked bast and
stalk went into the beater together. It was the only
way there would be enough of the plant material for a load. Though the
material required 3.5 hours in the Hollander, it make a gorgeous smooth and
silky pulp. Of course, daylight ran out. No time to empty the beater
and pull sheets.
6-3-03 Heavy rains overnight,
then showers this morning frustrated me. I wanted to see how the Joe-Pye
would pull. Finally about 2 PM the sun came out. Joe-Pye is a
keeper! The pulp is every so much like abaca. It's smooth, silky and
soft. Unbleached, it is a very pale cream with only the slightest hint of
yellowish green, the lightest unbleached pulp that I've found. The paper
is smooth and thin, with very fine floating pieces of fiber that I suspect come
from the bast, which was tougher than the stalk. The
Joe-Pye paper is excellent! Mind
you, this is not a visually beautiful paper in and of itself. My joy comes
from the fact that it is featureless, needs no bleaching and the tactile quality
of the paper is excellent. Good stuff! I did put a small amount of
the pulp in to bleach and pull tomorrow, but given how light colored the paper
is to begin with, I doubt that bleaching will change it much. (An aside --
for me, the results from working with this plant underline and point up two
things -- 1) that the time of year that a plant is harvested makes all the
difference in the world in how it processes and the result, and 2) knowledge
about processing plants is gained through the years makes just about as much
difference. In September
of 1991 I worked with this same plant and, viewing the results now from the
distance of time and experience, I understand why I did a rather sorry job of
it. Part of the problem then came because the plant material was gathered
in September and was summer hardened; but a bigger part of the problem came from
the fact that I did not know as much about processing plants then as I do now.
So...we learn, and having learned, it may pay to revisit some plants that were
problems before.) **Pulled sheets from the
bleached Siberian iris
pulp and the appearance of the paper is much more pleasing. It's a
pale cream, and the floating heavy fibers shine and glisten in the light.
The paper still has the problem of being heavy and the chunks, of course, are
still there, but both of those problems could have been fixed with a little more
effort. The pulp will be a good one for use as
double cones,
which require a heavy, fibrous pulp.
Back to the top
6-5-03 We had the pool opened
today. When the cover came off, my husband
took one look at the water and asked me
if I had been using the pool for a vat. Can't imagine why he would ask
that. **Pulled sheets from the bleached Joe-Pye weed, and there is a
definite difference in the paper. The color from the
tiny fibers that were visible in the
unbleached sheet has disappeared. Instead,
the bleached sheet (the paper on the
right) is solid and plain. For me, the character of the paper has
been destroyed. I'm going to prefer to use this plant in its natural
color. **Poured four large sheets this afternoon to use up the Siberian
iris pulp and a bag of hyacinth bean vine pulp that has been around long enough
for me to worry about. After I poured three sheets from that mixture, I
added some of the cooked common dock leaf stems to the remaining pulp for the
last sheet. I've found that pouring on a bare screen requires a steady hand and exactly the
right ratio of pulp to water. The sheets are done in two top-to-bottom pourings.
The first pouring uses a heavier ratio of pulp to water and produces
an uneven sheet with alternating
ridges and valleys. After that is poured, I thin the pulp and pour again.
The ridges from the previous pouring form dams that trap the pulp so it fills the valleys forming
a far more even sheet. This sheet
(approximately 20"x30" plus a little extra for trimming) is by no means even,
but this type of heavy paper is just what I need for the cones.
6-6-03 I wrote to a friend the
other day commenting that it's interesting how papermakers become enamored of
certain plants while working with them, only to drop them like last week's
boyfriend when another, more intriguing plant comes along. This week's
boyfriend is Joe-Pye weed. Last week's love was dock stalk. What will it be next
week? Whatever it is, it should be tender and easy. Perhaps it will be
bittersweet, the plant I
harvested today. Bittersweet is considered an invasive here, and it's
obvious why. The 12-15' vines that I gathered are just this season's growth, and
it's only June. Though the bast can be
peeled straight from the green vine, it comes off more cleanly and easily if
the vines are steamed first, adding yet another step in processing. Two
years ago I
made paper from the bast of 2-3 year old bittersweet vines, and it's truly
lovely, but I have never done the green, first season growth. Because only the bast from the plant is used and not the vine
itself, there is a good deal of labor for
small return with this plant. Rather than try to hack through those soggy strips of
steamed bast
with scissors (mine are as dull as a froe), I spread them out in the garage to
dry till tomorrow. They'll cut more easily when dry.
6-7-03 Did I say dry? We
had 4" of rain last night. The yard is soggy, the air is muggy, the deck
dripping, and yesterday's bast is still as limp and wet as it was yesterday
evening. It took some effort, but I cut the
bast and set it on to cook in soda ash along with the dried bittersweet bast
that I had gathered last year. I should have used lye instead of soda ash. You'd think
because the bast came from this year's growth, it would be fairly tender,
wouldn't you? Nope.
Tough stuff! After 3 hours, it was obvious soda ash
wasn't going to touch it. Oh...cooking in the soda ash did
separated the fibers lengthwise and did dissolve the gunk, but it left me with tightly
tangled clumps that were no where near done. (Caesar, on the other hand,
thought it was tender enough to eat. He managed a bite before I could yell scat. FWIW, bittersweet is listed as a toxic plant by many sites,
however, information is inconsistent about which part is toxic.
Variously listed are berries, unripe berries, leaves, roots and all parts.
Take your pick. Also FWIW, Caesar survived.) Two more hours cooking
in lye still did little to break the fibers down. I'll take another shot
at it tomorrow, though exactly what that shot will be is still up in the air.
6-8-03 This morning I cooked the bittersweet
bast another two hours in lye, and this did absolutely nothing more toward
breaking it down. We have reached the point of discussing divorce. To
rehash -- this stuff has
been cooked three hours in soda ash and four hours in lye. All this
cooking has broken the bast down to super fine fibers (cat hair thickness), but
they are still long and strong and are tangled into a solid mass. If I were a spinner, I would card and spin it. I think
it would do beautifully as yarn, even after all that cooking. The glob of
stuff truly reminds me
of some linen I once cooked and tried to beat. Instead, the linen beat me.
This bittersweet bast may very well follow the linen pulp out onto the
compost heap. The thing that perplexes me most is that I have made
paper before from this plant. That time I used bast from the second and
third year parts of the vine. Usually, the older the plant material, the
tougher is it. What is going on here? Why, if I can break down the
bast from 2nd and 3rd year vines, can't I do the same with the younger bast?
Before I toss this fiber, I want to show it to a weaver/spinner whom I know.
**I keep a bag of "odds and ends" pulp, the leavings from all the previous pullings. This year I'm trying to be good about keeping that bag within
reason as far as size and age. I put the contents into the blender to mix
them well, then pulled sheets until all was gone but a handful. That "seed
stock" went back into the bag and back into the refrigerator. Also managed
to find time to pull 112 swatches of western red cedar before yet more storms rolled in.
Back to the top
6-9-03
I've set the bittersweet fiber aside. Enough is enough, at least for now.
Instead, I'm cleaning pulp out the freezer. It's going to be a bit-by-bit
proposition, but that stuff has to come out. I've found that, for me,
freezing pulp is not the way to store it. It goes in the freezer well
enough, but it never comes back out. Did a lot of mixing and matching,
ending up with some really nice paper...and some that's not so pretty, but hey,
you can't win them all. While the sheets were drying, I picked
strawberries to fill the hole I made in the freezer, but I discovered I wasn't
totally out of papermaking mode. There were a few slug nibbled berries in
the bunch, and just for the heck of it, I sliced those paper thin, pulled a
sheet of white cotton rag pulp and placed the slices on it. After pressing
the sheet between boards, I let it air dry. Unfortunately, or fortunately
depending on how you look at it, the color of strawberry bled out into the
cotton rag making a ring around each slice. When the sheet was completely
dry, strawberries and paper alike, I misted it with water, then ironed to
flatten the waves. A surprise!. The laundry room was suddenly awash
with the unmistakable odor of fresh strawberry jam cooking on the stove.
The strawberry slice paper is
actually kind of pretty, even with the bleeding. The berries are flexible
and take bending on a fold well.
6-11-03
Drove down to Jabez to visit and have lunch with basketmaking friends.
When I got back, I harvested several slippery elm (also called red elm)
branches. Most of the limbs were an inch to an inch and a half in
diameter, but I hauled the limbs home intact rather than clipping the smaller
branches off on the spot. As it turned out, this was a good decision.
Elm strips so easily this time of year that
I was able to harvest the bast off
even the tiniest branches (foreground). I knew it would be impossible
to remove the bark from bast off the twigs, so
I kept it separate, and at some
point, I will cooked it up, bast and bark alike, and pull it into sheets.
Tiny mulberry limbs done this way (by including the bark) make a lovely sheet.
I don't see why elm won't work the same way, though I suspect there will be more
bark in the sheets than there was in the mulberry. **Rain started again,
curtailing outside paper stuff, but I did put
some giant philodendron selloum sheaths
on to cook for tomorrow. (I had gathered this from the Salvador Dali
Museum in St. Petersburg to use in baskets, but the temptation to see what they
would do in paper was too great.)
6-12-03
I'm not a big fan of handbeating (I always end up looking like a speckled hen),
but I didn't want to run the selloum through the blender. I wanted the
longer fibers to remain whole and I was afraid the beater would chop them too
short. Spent about 20 minutes beating until I was satisfied that the
fibers were fine enough to swirl, then rinsed and strained the pulp to remove
the trash. The long strand were mixed with Joe-Pye weed pulp and pulled.
The selloum fibers behaved
perfectly, swirling and twisting through the sheets. Just because I
really hate to waste any plant material, I
mixed the selloum trash from the
strainer with the remaining Joe-Pye weed pulp and pulled six small sheets.
They're "busy" but pretty. **If you've been following this journal, you've
met Tux, the Tourism cat. Although
she's a major tourist attraction (yes, people actually do come specifically to
visit Tux), the city provides no financial support for her. She's dependent
on donations to cover food and vet bills. To help a little along this
line, this afternoon I made
Tux-hair bookmarks for Tourism to give to visitors in return for a small
donation. [Later note. Several people have
asked about purchasing Tux bookmarks. I don't sell them, if anyone wants to mail
a small donation to Tourism and mark the envelope "ATTN: Tux bookmark," the
ladies there will be glad to send a bookmark in return. The address is:
Berea Welcome Center, 201 N Broadway, Berea, KY 40403.
Fair warning, knowing the women at Tourism, you'll likely get a brochure about
Berea, as well. Tux may be their love, but tourism is their job.]
6-13-03
Yet another day of rain. I did slip out between showers, cut bluegrass and
set this on to cook. Also cut up the elm and soaked it for cooking
tomorrow, but as predicted, the rain came and I could do nothing more today..
6-14-03
(To give you some idea of how wet it has been here, the front page of today's
Lexington paper proclaimed "No Rain Forecast for Today!" Time for
celebrating! The paper arrived at 5 AM. Rain, 3.75 inches of it,
arrived at 2 PM.) **Bluegrass is tender and processes better in a blender
than in a beater, but before I ran the cooked grass through the blender, I
reserved a small handful for another purpose.
Bluegrass makes a very fine fibered,
deep green sheet and can, be pulled tissue paper thin. The remainder
of the bluegrass pulp was bleached for the next paper. As an aside, for
the most part, my interest is focused on what kind of paper a plant will make,
and because of that, I'm dealing with pure plant pulp a good deal of the time.
And most of the time, pure plant pulp, if it is processed enough to produce a
good sheet of paper, is boring. It's fine fibered and homogenous.
That's not to say that pure plant paper is bad, just that the features that
might make it interesting have been processed out. I've been in a
discussion with Julie Johnson from Oregon about ways to produce pure paper, yet
still have the sheets be visually interesting. That was my reason for
reserving the handful of cooked, unprocessed bluegrass. I placed the green
material in a sandwich bag with a little water, sealed it, then manipulated and
massaged the grass till the fibers were partially separated. Then I poured
off the water, which by that time was definitely green, added more water and
poured off again, leaving me with nice green fibers but very little "loose
green" gunk. I added these hand manipulated fibers the bleached bluegrass
pulp and pulled tissue thin sheets from that.
These bleached bluegrass sheets
with the unbleached bluegrass fibers in them are outstanding. The
paper is pure, containing fiber from only one part of one plant, but it most
definitely isn't boring. Rain started just as I was pulling the last
sheets.
6-15-03
The sky cleared by afternoon and I was able to pull the elm bast. It's a
slick pulp, almost to the point of being slimy, and the drain time on thick
sheets would be extended unless the pulp were washed. (Elm reminds me
somewhat of cattail leaf pulp along that line. With cattail, a sturdier
paper can be obtained by dividing the pulp in half, adding water to one half,
pouring the well hydrated pulp into a wire strainer to remove some of the finest
fibers, then remixing both halves. I doubt I'll try that with this pulp,
at least for now.) Elm is really quite a pleasant pulp to pull.
The paper is thin, though far from fragile,
tan in color with a hint of cherry. The bast fibers form a solid sheet
with silky fibers shining on the surface. Bought a hard lesson with this
bast. I forgot to double check the bast strips for bark before cutting and
cooking. I realize I'll always have some fine bark pieces in bast pulp,
but this pulp had heavier chips that I know came from the base of branches.
A few minutes checking the strips would have eliminated those. There
aren't many of them in the pulp, but I'd rather there be none. Live and
learn. **I didn't have quite enough of the bleached bluegrass pulp to
finish a project, so I harvested more, cooked and bleached it. It will be
interesting to see if the papers pulled from this can be distinguished from
those of the previous pulling. On the
Yahoo
Papermaking list, we've been having a discussion about the differences
between papers made by different papermakers from the same plant. From
past experience, I know that even the same papermaker using the same
plant by the same methods may come up with papers that vary to one degree
or another. Part of this may be due to the seasonal differences in plants,
but even plants harvested in the same season can produce different paper from
previous pullings. I know when I harvested this last bluegrass, the leaf
blades were shorter (I'd already harvested the easy, "good stuff"), and I was
forced to cut lower on the remaining plants to get enough for a cooking.
This may very well affect the qualities of the pulp. Something to keep an
eye on.
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