Gin's Place

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8-1-03  I'm not certain, but I think I have been accused of being a paper purist.  (Please visualize a very large smiley face after that statement.)  The use of "paper purist" in this instance refers to a papermaker who believes in using only one plant fiber in a paper.  That's just about as far from what I do or believe as anything can be.  The vast majority of the sheets I produce are hybrid mixtures of fibers that work well together.  And the "work well together" phrase is the key to why I also produce pure, one-fiber papers. By processing plants into pure paper, I learn each plant's characteristics.  This in turn allows me to mix pulps more intelligently, balancing one pulp's weakness against another's strength.  The key is understanding.  After that comes playtime.

8-3-03  Hint:  Don't add psyllium fiber (aka Metamucil or Konsil) to pulp hoping to improve fiber content, consistency or drain time.  The fiber in those products does not swell when water is added.  Rather, it produces a clear, slick, slimy, gooey mucilage that makes holes in paper.  (Well, you never know unless you try.)

8-4-03  Laura and Maggie came over to play with pulp this morning.  Neither had worked with plant materials before, so the vats were filled with yucca and hickory, two very easy pulling pulps.  **I finally got around to bleaching and pulling the hickory, and again, I'm so impressed with this fiber for paper -- the ease of pulling, the smoothness of the sheets, the strength of the paper -- all perfect.  Hickory bleaches out to a smooth, pale cream, and can be pulled see-through thin without forming holes.

8-5-03  I have four huge pods of hosta plants, each pod perhaps five feet across.  Every year about August some of the leaves rot at the base and turn yellow.  I suppose if the plants were dug up and thinned, this wouldn't happen, but if it didn't happen, I wouldn't have any hosta leaf stems for papermaking until frost.  It's an ill wind...  I love hosta paper.  I hate making it.  Oh, the plant material cooks easily and quickly, processes easily in a blender and pulls beautifully, but the doggone stuff is high shrinkage and the sheets cockle in a second unless they're dried under pressure...lots of it and constant.  Still, the paper is worth it -- thin, rattly, translucent.

8-6-03  I've totally lost the two crispers at the bottom of the refrigerator, at least for storing foods.  They're stuffed with Ziplock bags of pulp.  I promised myself this wouldn't happen again.  Apparently, I am a failure at personal promises.  Today was spent making amends by mixing and pulling flat sheets.  What they'll become is anyone's guess, but the stuff is out of the refrigerator.  Some of the mixtures turned out to be outstanding.  Of course, they can't be duplicated, but then, none of the odds and ends sheets can be.  I may know the pulps that went into them, but never the proportions of each..  **I still had the psyllium goo from 8-3, so I played a little with it to answer Akua's list question about whether it might be used to make windows in sheets of paper.  The answer is a resounding NO.  The goo is/isn't like glue. It's sticky when wet, and glues itself hard to whatever it dries against, but dries brittle and crackly. I made the outline of a dancing boy with the goo on a screen and pulled a sheet of cotton rag over it. The think goo stayed in place.  The pulp flowed off it and formed a sheet around it, leaving a dancing boy window full of goo. I couched this sheet, goo and all, and left it to air dry.  It took maybe 18 hours for the goo part to dry. (No way to press any of this.) When I tried to remove the paper from the couching sheet, the cotton rag came loose, but the goo stuck hard to the couching sheet, and I had to tear it apart from the paper to get it loose from anything.  It definitely made a window in the paper, but it is, for the most part, an empty window.  Some of the goo broke off and stayed with the dancing boy but the remainder of the stiff, brittle stuff stuck solidly to the couching sheet, and it will take a good deal of soaking and scrubbing to get it off.  The dried goo cracks and crackles, but it will NOT peel off. If there is "an opportunity" here, it would have to lie in the realm of permanently gluing surfaces that will never be asked to bend, not as windows in the paper. And there are more reasonable glues to work with than the slick, slimy, yucky psyllium goo, so I think I've experimented enough with this stuff.

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8-7-03  There are two pods of blue fescue in my flower garden, and I hate the things because they get clumpier and uglier each year.  This morning I cut them off as close to the ground as possible and cooked the trimmings in soda ash.  If the pods die, so much the better.  They'll be easier to dig out come fall.  I made blue fescue paper back in March of 2002, and that time the bleached sheets surprised me with tiny black flecks, but this time the bleached pulp had none of them.  Dunno what's going on.  After finding that (or rather not finding them), I wished I had left the pulp its natural green.  Rather than pull pure sheets, I mixed the blue fescue pulp with some spiderwort, about half and half.  The paper from the mixture, while not outstanding, is better than sheets from either of the pulps by themselves. 

8-9-03  Began the morning at the Artisan Center catching up on local gossip over coffee.  From there I headed across the road to an overgrown field owned by Berea College.  The strip of land alongside the road had been mowed to make a temporary parking area for the Artisan Center ribbon cutting.  This gave me unhampered access to potions of the field that are normally inaccessible because of briars and honeysuckle.  Last year just about this time, I had to pick around here and there on the Center site to find enough agrimony to try, but here, just across the road, it was growing in abundance, and I had no trouble gathering enough for a beater load.  The plants are just beginning to bloom and the upper leaves are still rich and green.  The lower leaves, those shaded by adjacent plants, have died back and are a deep, rich, mahogany brown.  The leaves and blooms were stripped and discarded on site, and at home, the chipper made short work of chopping the stalks.  The chopped mass went into a stainless pot with soda ash to cook for four hours.  When I did agrimony last year, it had taken about 3 or 3.5 hours to cook, so I knew it was going to take that long or longer (these were slightly larger stalks).  Normally when material has to be cooked more than three hours, I'll use lye, but using soda ash had yielded such a lovely mahogany color, and this was what I wanted again.  I don't know that using lye would have altered that color, but I didn't want to find out, at least, not now.  Washed and beat the agrimony for about an hour, then shut the beater down for the night, leaving probably 3 hours beating for tomorrow.. 

8-10-03  Agrimony is an interesting plant.  It's regarded as an herb, but is tall and rangy and hardly seems like one.  Anglo-Saxons recommended that it be taken with a mixture of pounded frogs and human blood as a remedy for internal hemorrhaging.  H'okay....  I think I'll reserve the plant for papermaking and dyeing, thankyouverymuch.  And it does make a lovely, rich, mahogany brown dye.  Last night just to see how well this color would transfer, I placed a honeysuckle basket in the dye bath and left overnight.  It took the color beautifully.  (I failed to take a pre-dyeing picture, but this is a similar, undyed basket for comparison.)  **The color shift that occurs between raw plant materials and the paper they ultimately make is interesting.  Most plants that I've worked make a paper that is fairly close to the original plant color (i.e. green plant material makes a paper that is some shade of green, brown makes a shade of brown), but agrimony changes dramatically.   Uncooked, the stalks are a pale green, but the paper made from them is mahogany.  The color shift begins to take place almost immediately upon cooking and continues until the color is deep and rich.  **It took three hours to finish beating yesterday's agrimony pulp, then I pulled 120 swatches plus test sheets.  Agrimony paper has good points and bad ones.  It pulls easily; it has a good, solid base of fine fibers to float the heavier, more visible ones; drain time is a little long but within the acceptable range; and of course, the color is excellent.  There are two down sides to agrimony.  First, because the pulp contains coarser fibers mixed in with the fine ones, it must be pressed to achieve a smooth surface, making it impossible to dry this one on glass.  The other down side is tear strength.  Mind you, this isn't a brittle paper, but it tears more easily than I like.  It's always possible to add a second, tougher fiber to any pulp to rectify this, but suitable fibers that can be added to agrimony are limited if the mahogany color is to be retained in the sheets.  Ideally, it would be something that is strong and reasonably close in color, such as hickory or curly dock.  I have both of those available, and may try them, but first I'd like to try mulberry.  Although that pulp is white, I think it can be added in small enough amounts to increase the strength of the agrimony without altering the color.  We'll see, probably day after tomorrow. 

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8-12-03  Today's plans were changed.  KET was filming in Berea.  Craftsmen were asked to do demos -- broom making, weaving, watercolor, papermaking -- at the Artisan Center this morning for the filming.  Fortunately, my time on camera was brief, so I didn't the opportunity to put foot in mouth.  This afternoon Bennet, a young man who is university bound on Friday, came to pull paper.  He was fascinated by lamps he had seen on a recent trip to Japan, and wanted to learn something about how paper was made for them.  He's a good kid and we had fun.  Just as he left, Charlie, a basketmaking friend, showed up on my doorstep with a huge load of Jimsonweed.  (A few days ago when she was here to pick up dye, I had casually mentioned I would love to have a little of the weed to fool with.  Charlie doesn't take anything casually, and she doesn't know the definition of "a little.".)  Jimsonweed is a highly narcotic plant.  According to poisonous plant websites, it's chocked full of hyoscyamine, atropine and scopolamine.  Fun stuff...NOT.  (Not only that, it has huge, stickery seedpods and it  just plain stinks.)  I was interested in the bast from the plant, so the rest of the day was spent in surgical gloves stripping it.  (It's amazing how much hands sweat in those gloves.)  About dusk, mosquitoes drove me inside before I was through stripping.

8-13-03  I still had the agrimony pulp to deal with, but rather than mix mulberry pulp with it to improve the strength of the sheets, I used a small amount of abaca, probably a mistake because this did dramatically change the color.  It's not unpleasing, but is considerably lighter than the pure sheets, and lighter than I wanted.  **Finished stripping the Jimsonweed stalks and set the material on to cook.  The bast on these plants is terribly inconsistent.  Usually, the thickest bast of any plant is on the base and diminishes in thickness toward the top, but Jimsonweed is weird.  Some of the plants that Charlie brought followed that pattern, but others had no bast at all on the bases and did have toward the tops.  Yield per time involved stripping is low.  In addition, all of the material covering the stalks contained a good deal of non-fibrous material that made great quantities of gunk when cooked up, further reducing the yield.  I wasn't exactly sure what to do with the mass because of the gunk.  There doesn't appear to be any way to get rid of it without losing the bast fibers, at least I couldn't discover a way.  I lightly hand beat the cooked material, trying retain the structure of the fragile fibers.  Pulled a few test sheets from the pure Jimsonweed for my records.  The pure pulp wasn't as difficult to handle as I expected given the amount of gunk still in it and given that the pulp was only beaten lightly.  Just guessing here, but I have a feeling these sheets will cockle in humid conditions.  Cockling often occurs in dramatically under beaten pulps, such as this one, even though sheets are fully dry before being removed from restraint.  This seems to occur because of the relatively large areas of under beaten fibers, which in humid conditions, react in a different manner from surrounding portions of the sheet..  Mixed some abaca in to improve the quality of the paper and pulled additional sheets. 

8-14-03  Had breakfast at the Artisan Center with some of the Berea craftsmen.  (Yes, I know "craftsmen" is not PC, but I think "craftsperson" is a sorry replacement for a word that carries the connotation of quality.)  This breakfast bit is getting to be a habit, which wouldn't be all that bad as far as habits go, except the food is good...too good and too much of it.  **Came home to pull sheets for a book I'm making for a friend, Dorothy Tredennick, who will turn 90 (I think) in October.  Dorothy, a former professor of fine arts at Berea College, did her best last year to teach me sumi-e, before finally giving up and declaring me hopeless.  I forgave her.  While I was in her class, I started to carve a chop from a deer antler, but then realized that I had no way to hold the antler secure for carving.  Instead, I cut the antler into disks and did a very non-professional job of scrimshawing cattails on it and mounted that on the front of a book.  Dorothy fell in love with it, and I am making a copy of this book her.  (No, I don't think she's apt to see this post.)

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8-17-03  I've been AWOL from the day-to-day journaling in order to do a little background rearranging of the website that will make it a little easier for me to maintain.  Most of the changes are transparent, but I did move the search function to the bottom of the page and added an "About the artisan."  There is also a paper FAQs page that is accessible from the left sidebar.  Other than that, all is the same, at least to the user.  **In addition to playing with the website, I've been pulling 75-100 sheets of paper a day to be used for books this fall and winter.  Most have been made from different odds and ends light colored mixtures that made lovely sheets for books.  I especially liked those that included under beaten daylily leaves from the freezer. 

8-18-03  I blame this day on MJ and a suggestion she offered via email.  I spent the better part of the day fooling around with intentionally under mixed pulps, attempting to create clouds or designs in sheets of paper.  I had some dark agrimony pulp that really needed pulling, and thought it would be nice to use some white cotton rag lightly mixed with it as a contrast.  In theory, this works.  In practice, it only works for the first sheet pulled from the vat.  The action of pulling that sheet and then gently stirring for the next sheet broke up the cotton rag and created a vat full of well mixed pulp, which, of course, defeated my whole purpose.  The only way I could manage to keep the pulp under mixed  was to replenish the slurry between each sheet and do that carefully.  When I managed that, the sheets were pleasing, nothing outstanding, but still nice.  (Sorry, no pictures.  The photos are all conveniently out of focus.) 

8-20-03  The project for today was 25 two-piece cards (white inside card, colored outside card) and white cotton rag envelopes with a matching colored flap.  Exploring the refrigerator crisper yielded several choices for the card and envelope flap -- cattail head, hickory, agrimony and a dark mixed pulp.  Ah!  The cattail head makes a delightfully interesting textured sheet.  It would perfect for the card.  NOT!  I'd forgotten how l-o-n-g the drain time is on that pulp.  I remembered after loading the vat and pulling the first sheet.  (This is why I keep records, right?  So I won't forget things like this, so I won't waste time loading a vat...then unloading it because a pulp isn't suitable, right?)  Agrimony was my second choice, and it worked well.  Pulled the outside cards, set them to dry in the press while I pulled the envelopes.  Normally, I exchange dry in a press because that gives the best surfaces to sheets, but because only one side of the envelopes needed to be perfect, I opted to dry them on glass.  Our dining room has three sets of double sliding glass doors that open out onto the deck and easily accessible from my pulling area.  I foot pressed the first post of 13 between boards, walked around the deck and smoothed them on the glass, then went back and pulled the remaining 12 and pressed them.  While I was standing there, rocking back and forth on the stack, I noticed I had a problem.  My nice sunny day was turning cloudy, and we're not talking high floating mare's tail fluff here.  These were thunderheads...billowing castles with ominously dark bases  The possibility of storms did not fit into my agenda.  Given that, I really didn't want to put more envelopes on the glass and expose them to the possibility of rain.  What to do?  Then I had one of those embarrassing "Duh!" revelations that we all have at some point.  Sliding glass doors have TWO sides, dummy, an exposed outside and a safe, dry INSIDE side!  As I said...duh! not to mention embarrassing.  (I had always dried outside because it was convenient to my couching area, and I'd never been faced with rain before.  I didn't question what I was doing until I was forced to.  Now, I've vowed to step back and  take an objective look at everything I do.  Will I?  Of course not.)  The freshly pulled envelopes went on the safe side of the glass.  I chose to leave the first envelopes where they were and keep an eye on the sky while I pulled the inside cards. 

8-21-03  The skies cleared yesterday evening, so I ended up leaving the envelopes outside on the glass overnight.  They weren't quite dry enough to take down.  Assembled all the sheets this morning and folded and glued them.  They made a nice set.

8-23-03  The field across from the Artisan Center had been mowed for parking during the ribbon cutting last month, and the Johnsongrass that grows there has regenerated itself nicely.  From the papermaker's POV, this is good.  Farmers think otherwise, and for good reason.  Johnsongrass is the most invasive grass that has been introduced into this region.  However, the grass does make a lovely paper as long as the stems have not become tough and pithy.  This new growth was 2'-3' tall and quite tender, and it was easy to harvest more than enough for a pot full in just a few minutes.  There were a few stalks that had already formed joint nodes.  Although these were not pithy, they were too tough to cook with the tender leaves, so I set them aside to dry for use later on.  Cooked the grass for an hour in soda ash, then processed in the blender.  The Johnsongrass leaf sheets are a deep, rich green, though this will fade.  It's unfortunate, because the color is lovely.  The remainder of the pulp was set to bleach overnight in hydrogen peroxide.

8-24-03  Johnsongrass bleaches out to a parchment like color and pulls a beautiful sheet that requires no sizing.  Johnsongrass does have one major drawback.  The papers cockle and curl unless tightly restrained during drying.  Apparently I didn't have enough pressure on some of the sheets I dried this morning.  When I opened the press, they were rippled and uneven.  This isn't difficult to fix, but it's an extra step and an aggravation that could have been avoided.  I misted the sheets with a spray bottle, then put them back in the press, this time making sure it was down tight.  **Tourism was out of Tux bookmarks, and I had enough cat hair to pull two dozen or so.  Rather than pull large sheets and cut them into bookmarks, I made a deckle from 1/2" foam insulation that will pull four at a time.  The deckle fits on top of a mould that I use for 5.5"x8.5" sheets.  (This 1/2" insulation is also good for creating decorative deckles in any form or shape.) 

8-25-03  Took the cat hair bookmarks down to Tourism.  While I was in Old Town, I harvested some great bulrush down by the railroad tracks.  At home, I cut up the stems, discarding the seed heads, and cooked the stems in soda ash.  The cooking "soup" produced a pale tan dye on the tee shirt I've been using to record colors.  (A note here about my use of the terms "dye" or "dyeing."  Staining would probably be better terminology, because I'm simply soaking a spot on the tee shirt and allowing it to dry, then later, washing the shirt to see how much of the color leaves.  I realize this is not a proper technique for permanently dyeing fabric, but I'm having fun, so don't knock it.  At some point, I'll post a picture of the shirt of many colors.)

8-26-03  The bulrush is more appropriate for the blender than the beater, and it processed into a slick, smooth pulp that pulled super thin, dark olive sheets.  Actually, it would be difficult to pull thick sheets from pure bulrush because it drains so slowly.  I had a little cotton rag, so I mixed some of that with the bulrush to see if that would speed the drain time.  It did, but the resulting wet sheet was a wretched color, sort of a yucky sick olive green.  By now, I should know better than to judge paper by what it looks like wet.  The cotton rag/bulrush paper actually did turn out quite pretty when dry, and the quality of the paper is much better.  Mind you, there's really nothing wrong with the pure bulrush paper, but its use is limited because it's so thin.  The cotton rag gave it some bulk and body, expanding the possibilities. **The humidity today is terrible.  Walking out from air conditioning is like walking into a steam bath.  About midday I began looking for jobs inside.  I grabbed a bag of butterflyweed seeds from the back porch and went inside to see if I could find an easy way of separating fluff from seeds.  I found that if you put the fluff in a gallon Ziplock bag and seal it, you can manipulate the stuff from the outside and separate the seeds from the fluff without having the fuzzies fly all over the place.  The seeds drop to the bottom of the bag, leaving the fluff on top. 

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8-27-03  The old Betty Crocker blender I've been using to pulp plant materials has been making funny noises.  It's a cheap one with plastic gears, and I suspect those are worn.  It's still working, but I have a feeling not for long.  This morning I made a Wal-Mart run and picked up a cheap Sunbeam to replace it.  On the way home, I stopped by Jerry Workman's to pick up some smartweed he was saving for me.  (Given that the smartweed was still attached to the ground, I am beginning to suspect that Jerry's offer was a ploy to get help weeding his flowerbed.  I'm a good person, not to mention being a sucker, as well.)  We pulled an armload of smartweed, then another armload of dayflowers.  At a casual glance, both plants look much alike, and they both break easily at the joints, making it necessary to grasp the plants near the base to pull them from the ground.  Jerry's mother called dayflowers "chicken bones" because of this snapping at the joint.  I can see why.  The smartweed stems seemed tougher than the dayflower, but then this figures.  Smartweed is in the knotweed family, while dayflowers belong to the spiderwort family.  The smartweed leaves were net veined, so I didn't want to include them in the cooking pot.  After stripping and discarding the leaves and the heavier joints, there really wasn't much left.  Much work for little return.  When I cut up the dayflowers, I opted to leave the parallel veined leaves on them.  If they cook to mush, they can be rinsed out with the hose.  There is a risk that the seeds, which will also be present, may cause a problem, but with most plants, the seeds will soften and mash flat in the press and make interesting inclusions in the paper.  The dayflower was cooked about 3 hours in soda ash and rinsed in a paint strainer bag.  As I expected, the dayflower leaves cooked to mush and ended up as gook amongst the stems.  This stuff has almost no fiber and doesn't really belong in the paper pulp.  Washing with a hose and a wire strainer solved that problem.  Too late to do anything else with it today.  The smartweed was also left for tomorrow.

8-28-03  The cooked dayflower made a good test material for the new replacement blender.  I wanted to do this while the old blender was still functioning to give a side-by-side comparison.  Good thing.  There was no comparison!  The dayflower processed for 30 seconds in the new blender was still chunky, while that done for the same length of time in the old blender, even with its slipping gears, was much smoother.  (This dayflower material isn't something that I would normally process in a blender, but it gave a good indication of what a blender could do with it.)  The material seemed to wrap around the blades of the new blender rather than circulate with the water.  This is not good.  I compared the containers of two blenders, and the new Sunbeam's is smooth and round.  The old blender container is round, but it has three ridges or baffles, and I suspect that they are there to disrupt the round-and-round effect.  The new blender is useless for my purpose, so I washed and reboxed it to take back to Wal-Mart.  **All of the dayflower, both partially blender processed and unprocessed, went into the Lander beater for three hours, and made a nice pulp, though the color isn't impressive.  I pulled a few unbleached dayflower sheets for records (note the seeds in the sheet), then bleached the remainder of the pulp.  **The smartweed proved to be surprisingly tough, much more so than the dayflower, even though they looked and felt much alike in the raw state.  Cooking for three hours did little more than soften it.  I ran it through the blender to break it up into fibers to be used as an inclusion.  Cooking did change the color of the smartweed from green to a nice rusty red.  The combination of the bleached dayflower pulp with washed smartweed inclusions made a lovely paper.   **We've had no rain for a few days and things are finally beginning to dry out a little.  Some time in the next few days I'll head out to gather cattail and sedge from a place that has been too marshy and muddy until now.

8-29-03  Went to Wal-Mart first thing this morning and exchanged the Sunbeam for a mid-range price Osterizer with a square container.  Came home, cooked the Johnsongrass stems I had set aside last week and tried those in the old blender and the Osterizer.  (I only did the stems for 5 seconds because they are much more tender than the smartweed.  Thirty seconds would have made puree out of them in both blenders and left me little way to compare.)  Circulation in the new one is perfect.  Johnsongrass pulped in the new blender is slightly finer than that done in my old blender.  Conclusion -- don't try processing plant materials in a blender with a totally round top container.  Use one that has a container with irregularities that will improve circulation.  Of course, this may be a totally erroneous conclusion, but I'm blissfully happy with it.

8-30-03  The cooking pot I had left on the deck accumulated 2.25" of rainwater between the overnight storms and those that came during the morning hours.  So much for the dry spell.  I fought more showers and storms off an on all day, pulling between them, then ducking inside and drying sheets when the rain fell.  Not a lot of fun.  I did come out of the hassle with some really pretty paper.  The Johnsongrass stalks that I used yesterday testing blenders turned out beautifully after a little additional processing, and made a lovely, thin, see-through paper.  Because Johnsongrass has nodes that are tougher than the rest of the stem, it processes unevenly.  This would be a problem except that was what I wanted...a pure paper with character.  When I mixed the smartweed/dayflower pulp with the Johnsongrass, the sheets were even prettier.  These pulps are fibrous, and it wouldn't be possible to make smooth, good quality paper from them without a press.  The base pulp is very thin, but the smartweed fibers, though soft, are hefty by comparison.  The press flattens them nicely and creates perfectly smooth, thin sheets.  **Earlier this summer while walking through the woods, I found a limb covered in a frilly fungus of some type, and of course, I hauled the limb home.  (Don't ask me what kind of fungus.  Mushrooms are not my thing.)  When damp, even just from humidity, the fungus is soft and pliable, and my thinking was to include it in a thin, light colored paper.  The Johnsongrass was perfect for this.  I did two sheets -- one, which I dried in the press; and another, which I pressed to remove the water, then allowed to air dry and cockle.  I love the effect in both sheets, however, I have a sneaky feeling the fungus' tendency to become soft and pliable in high humidity conditions will cause a problem with the flat sheet.  I'll likely find out this evening.  Heaven knows it's humid enough to test it.