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10-1-03 I have a hard time
committing to long range things. I suppose this could be consider a
personal failing, but I'd rather look at it as a virtue. I won't obligate
myself to plans until I know that I can and will fulfill the commitment.
Since last winter, I have considered putting together a limited edition,
handbound book on paper from local plants. Over the summer, I've even
pulled something like 4000 swatches toward that end, but there had been no
formal commitment on my part until this past week. There is now. And
if you read this journal regularly, just be aware that you'll be forced to go
through all the frustrations of doing this with me. And here comes the
first one -- last month's cattails. I wanted to pull three separate sets
of swatches for the book to illustrate the difference in the paper quality that
comes from washing the pulp, but that meant pulling unwashed pulp for the first
set of swatches. At best, the unwashed cattail pulp makes
a poor paper with uneven fiber
content and a paper with limited options for use. (Usually, the
non-fibrous material [gunk] can be washed out of plant material after cooking,
but this material is inside the cattail leaf, and no amount of washing prior to
beating will remove it.) Because of the characteristics of the unwashed
cattail pulp, pulling requires a formation aid to distribute the fibers evenly
in the vat. This increases the drain time, which is long to begin with
because of the fine fiber and the gunk that is still present. Paper
pulling today wasn't quite as much fun as usual.
10-2-03 Today's cattail
session was much better. The remaining pulp was washed, removing all of
the gunk and a good deal of the super fine fibers that degrade the quality of
the paper. The resulting pulp pulled without a formation aid and made
a much better, more solid sheet.
The remaining pulp from that pulling was bleached, then swatches pulled from
that. Cattail bleaches out into
a lovely light cream and the paper
is an excellent quality. **This
afternoon my next door neighbor gifted me with his entire crop of sweet potato
vines...minus the potatoes. He drove up on his trusty green lawn tractor with
attached wagon, dumped the huge pile of vines by my garage door, waved at me as
I was coming out to see what was going on...and drove off. He's a generous, good
hearted man of few words. Gotta love neighbors like that. I pulled and
discarded the leaves, then cut the vines up and set them on to cook in soda ash.
As it turned out, this was a mistake. The vines seemed tender enough, and
the outside and inside of the vine were tender, but the true fibers that
made up the vine were tough. After cooking for two hours in soda ash, the
outside "bark" and the soft inner core dissolved and could be washed out with
hose, but that left the tough,
now-hollow vine sections of vine fiber basically untouched by the cooking.
I will be out of town for a few days, so this will be cooked in lye later when
I'm back.
10-6-03 Four days later and
the partially cooked sweet potato vine didn't magically recook and convert
itself into pulp while I was gone. I plopped it into a pot with lye this
time, cooked it for two hours, then tried it in the blender. Ha!
Tough stuff and nowhere near done! It's possible that cooking an
additional two or three hours might have reduced it to something the blender
could handle, but I didn't care to do that. The color is lovely, almost
orange, and I may use the fibers in their present state as an inclusion in some
other pulp, but I had other things to do today. **This spring I started
several kenaf plants from seed just to see how the plant grew. It has a
long growing season, and unfortunately I wasn't able to get them out early
enough so they could bloom. We had a killing frost while I was gone, and I
came back to some very sick looking plants. Earlier, I had harvested one
plant just to see whether the bast would strip, and discovered that the stalks
caused my arms to break out in hives. There are
tiny thorns on both the stalks and
the leaves that caused the irritation, so I was a little leery about
harvesting the remaining plants, but this fear turned out to be groundless.
By wearing a long sleeve shirt, gloves and long pants, I avoided the problem.
I had been told to allow the plants to ret, but the bast stripped from end to
end easily and cleanly, and I saw no reason to wait. I did take time to
scrape the outer "bark" from the stalks, so there won't be as much of that to
contend with later. According to the online information on kenaf, the stalks
themselves can be processed into paper "suitable for newsprint," but I opted not
to follow up on that. In order to strip the bast, it's necessary to remove
the leaves and side stalks. These plants had few side stalks, but I did
strip the bast from the ones they did have and saved it along with the other.
The kenaf leaves come in two sizes -- the small, short stemmed ones, and the
larger ones with stems nearly a foot long. It was obvious that the longer
leaf stems had a good deal of fiber on the outside, and that the inner stem had
additional fiber. Not being one to waste anything interesting, broke off
and discarded the leaf part and saved the stem. Doing that only took a few
minutes. The stems were cut up into 1" lengths and cooked in lye for 2
hours. In the blender they processed into a delightfully smooth and creamy
pulp, which I set aside for tomorrow.
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10-7-03 The kenaf leaf stem
pulp is interesting. It is composed of two distinct fiber types -- a super
fine one, which comes from the leaf stem covering, and a heavier fiber from the
actual leaf stem. (The differences in
the fibers are especially evident when
the paper is backlit.) The natural color of the
kenaf leaf stem paper is a
light tan, and the fine fibers allow for pulling a super fine sheet.
Bleaching produces a cream sheet that is slightly stiffer due to the loss of
fine fibers when rinsing. **I had two different plant materials to simmer
today (both mulberry basts, one from red mulberry with bark, one from white
mulberry without bark), but I really didn't want to make two cookings out of them
because neither was enough to fill a pot. Put one bast a knee-hi nylon stocking? Why not! And it worked quite well, though in the process I
discovered that brown nylon cooked in soda ash turns blue, not that I'll ever
need that bit of information, mind you, but it's good to know...I suppose.
10-8-03 It
was an interesting day, which provided a laugh in the end. Roofers came
to rip the shingles from the back roof of the house and replace them.
Because I work on the back deck, that meant either I had to give up the day or
move my workspace. I opted to shift. This really wasn't all that
difficult. The deck runs around the house, so I was able to move my table
onto the side at the front corner, a place that was safe from anything falling
from above. Yeah... **Both of the mulberry basts cooked yesterday were
harvested last spring and dried in strips for later use. The bast from the
larger limbs was stripped, then then bark stripped from that. However,
with the smallest limbs, it isn't practical to remove the bark. Instead,
it is left on until the strips are dry, then the bark can be "ruffled"
off by twisting and shaking the bast.. This process leaves about 1/3 of
the very thin bark still attached, and it is cooked along with the bast.
Sheets pulled from this bast/bark mixture are lovely. The bast, which had
been cooked in the nylon stocking, had no bark and
processed into lovely, thin
white paper. (Okay, I'll admit to a few specks of unintentional bark.
The bast for these papers came from fencerow mulberry trees, not
from carefully cultivated paper mulberries.) Outside of having the beating
and pounding background noise of the roofers, my new little papermaking niche
seemed quite adequate, so I decided to mix and pull up some of the excess pulp
that had accumulated in the refrigerator. There were bags of wool grass,
Indian hemp, a dab of mulberry and other odds and ends, but the colors looked
compatible. I had enough to pull nearly 40 sheets, and
the mixture actually made a nice paper. Just as I pulled the last sheet, I heard a different sound
from the rooftop. A chainsaw? Huh??? What the heck would they
be doing with a chainsaw up there? Then it dawned on me...nah,
it's not a chainsaw, it's just a leaf blower. They're cleaning the stuff
off the roof...yeah, that's it. And just as that realization sank in, down
came a thick shower of roofing gravel...into the vat...onto the post of sheets
I'd just pulled...into my hair.... Nothing disastrous, but I did dump the
contents of the vat -- water, pulp and roofing particles -- over the side of the
deck.
10-9-03 I am AWOL volunteering
during the Kentucky Guild Fall Fair, Oct 10-11.
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10-15-03 I pulled doormats
today, at least that's what the sheets of fiber looked like...fuzzy, fibrous.
miniature doormats. The plant material was gingko leaf, and I'm not
happy with it, but I didn't expect to be. I've done this plant material
before. The fibers
are short, and the paper that results, though a pretty color, is weak. The
pulp
drains far too quickly on the screen, making it difficult for form an even sheet
of any size. Not pleasant pulling, but I have a purpose for them.
10-16-03 I had kept back some
of
the gingko pulp, and today was an exercise in making a silk
purse. The gingko was the sow's ear. I wanted to pull swatches to
illustrate how using two faulty pulps can create a good paper. The pulps
were the gingko, as I said before, and a super fine mulberry bast pulp.
Normally, mulberry is an excellent fiber, but this particular batch had
processed into a pulp that drained so slowly that pulling pure sheets was next
to impossible. The idea today was to use the faults of the pulps to offset
each other -- the short fibered gingko, which drained too quickly, and the long
fibered mulberry, which drained two slowly. I played with various ratios,
and settled on a 50/50 mixture The offsetting drain times of the pulps allowed for
pulling an even sheet without waiting forever, and the
mulberry fibers strengthened the paper. The color of
the gingko/mulberry paper is
lighter than the pure gingko, and in some ways resembles yucca. **I'm in the process of clearing pulp from both the refrigerator
and freezer. Most of the pulps will be mixed and poured into big sheets
over the next few days (weather permitting), but some will be pulled into sheets
for bookbinding during the winter. A freezer bag of
broomsedge pulp mixed with a dab
of gampi pulled some rather nice sheets.
10-18-03 Everyone should be
brought down occasionally, if for no other reason than to prevent over
confidence. I ate my humble pie today. I'm in the process of pouring
the large, heavy sheets of paper that will be used in a massive mobile to be
constructed in January or February. These sheets are made by pouring pulp
onto unframed screens lying directly on a pebbled concrete walkway. The
concrete is slanted slightly, which allows the water to drain away nicely.
The largest of these sheets are about 2.5' by 6'...big, thick rascals that take
a long time to dry this time of year, even in the sun. The ones I poured
this morning were drying nicely, lying there on the raised pebbles of the
walkway, but two large ones poured after lunch weren't drying quickly enough to
suit me. In a flash of brilliance, I decided to take them around to the
front of the house and drape the sheets, still on the screens, over the deck
railing where the sun would hit them full. Great idea, but I didn't take
into account the effect of gravity on what amounted to unsupported wet pulp.
As I draped the first screen over the railing, the top edge of the pulp sheet
began to pull away...and there was no way to stop it. Almost in slow
motion, the full 2.5'x6' sheet of heavy, wet pulp came away from the screen,
tumbling through the air and landing with a soggy PLOP! I leaned on the
railing and studied the crumpled mass of pulp on the ground eight feet beneath
me. I went in, poured a cup of coffee. I came back out and studied
it some more. Y'know, it really is a rather artistically draped plop... I left it
there to dry.
10-20-03 Outside of one
slightly muddy paw print (which I attribute to Caesar, the papermaking cat), the
artistic plop was untouched yesterday morning, though still very soggy. I
left it to finish drying and and spent the day pouring more big sheets...which I
did not move. By evening the crumpled mass was dry. It is now
mounted and hanging on my wall as a
reminder that bright ideas and smugness are no match for nature's laws.
10-21-03 Last summer at the
Artisan Center site, I harvested green milkweed, something I would never have
done if it had not been for the bulldozers bearing down on the plants.
There were hundreds of stalks, far more than I could process into pulp at that
time. Instead, I steamed and stripped the stalks and dried the bast, but I
had done nothing with the bast until now. Never having worked from dried
bast that had been steamed from the stalks, I really wasn't certain now to
proceed or what the results would be. The "bark" was still on the bast,
and the strips had turned dark and hard.
About a week ago, I put some of the bast in to soak, leaving the pail out in the
sun to bleach changing the water each day. The sun's rays did lighten the
bast somewhat, though not as much as bleach would have done. By this
morning it was possible to rake the portion of the bark with black spots off the
bast, but removing all of it would have been impossible. I opted to cut
and cook the bast and see what happened. It cooked and processed up
nicely, but between the formation aid and the natural clinging quality of the
fibers, pulling the pulp in the swatch deckle was a pill. The small sheets
pulled evenly enough, but the swatches clung to the sides of the deckle and
wanted to come up with when it was removed from the mould. I fought it for
a few sheets, but it became obvious that I wasn't going to be able to pull 100+
swatches that way. About half the clinging problem was being caused by the
formation aid, but that had to be there to keep the fibers separated in the vat.
I found that if I pulled a sheet, then repulled through a vat of clear water,
the swatches came out of the deckle cleanly. (After the experience with
the artistic plop, I'm afraid to insert a ::smug smile:: here, but I really want
to.) The milkweed paper from the
steamed/dried bast isn't quite as white or as clean as those from plants
harvested after the bast dries on the stalks, but it's still lovely, silky
paper.
10-24-03 Today's high is
supposed to be 68 degrees. This will be my last day of pouring big sheets.
The pulp and the warm weather are running out at the same time. The last
of the pulp for the big sheets was a mixture of Joe-Pye, yucca and hickory, and
I had enough for two small sheets.
**I The only other pulp I had left was
butterflyweed, which I pulled into
swatches. Gorgeous stuff, but even meaner than the milkweed to pull.
10-25-03 The last two sheets
of big paper were dry this morning and came off the screen nicely. Just
for the heck of it, I piled all the big sheets on the living room floor and took
this shot, which doesn't do the
numbers justice. Many of the sheets are buried underneath the larger ones.
Whatever. These will be folded into cones that will go into a huge mobile
I plan on assembling in mid winter. **The rest of today was spent cleaning
up and putting away paper stuff. Either my storage space has shrunk, or
I've acquired more papermaking equipment.
Because of the cold
weather, the papermaking season is coming to a close for me. There may be
sporadic entries if there are warm days, but my focus will be shifting to
bookbinding until next spring. I keep a bookbinding journal on this site,
similar to this one (see right-hand column in the archive list below). At some point in the next few weeks, that journal
will spring to life. Feel free to join me there.
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