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The signup for the August 2-4 Paper from
Plants workshop here in Berea ends on July 19. This is basically a
beginning class, though it would be valuable to those who have some experience
working with plant materials. The workshop will begin with a brief
introduction to plant papermaking, covering both fiber information and methods
of processing. This will be followed by a trip to the fields to gather
materials, then learning how to work with those fibers. The final day with
be an informal day of creative fun.
7-1-04 I've been playing
around with hickory pulp the last few days, but haven't bothered to take any "in
progress" pictures. You're stuck with the end product shots, at least for
now. I did two paper hats from hickory. The first one is rough
looking, much like a beat up fishing hat.
The second is a slicker version, good enough
perhaps for formal, though sporty, wear. My husband asked if I'd do
one for him, so that's likely tomorrow's project. I'll do step-by-step
shots on it.
7-2-04 The hats I did
yesterday took 6 thick sheets of 5"x8" hickory bast paper each. The one I did
today was going to be larger, so I pulled 12, allowing extra to double up on the
sheets at the front of the rim. I foot pressed these between boards to
compress and expel the water, but didn't put them into the press. Straw
hats work beautifully as forms because they hold their shape; they breath,
helping to dry the paper; and the paper doesn't stick to them. I
tore pieces from the hickory sheets (they're amazingly tough!) and
started with the brim, then worked
my way down the sides, adding pieces
until the top was covered.
Each piece was touched along the edge with cooked Argo Gloss Laundry Starch,
then mated with another that had been brushed along the edge, as well. I
like Argo as a bonding agent, especially for the hats. It gives instant
attachment, making work go quickly, and it stiffens the final piece. When
I use the starch as a glue, I mix 2 Tablespoons of dry starch with 3 Tablespoons
of cold water, then add a cup of boiling water. This makes it smooth and
creamy, just right for a brush. At least, it's that way the first day.
After that, it becomes sort of chunky and harder to smooth on, so sometimes I
just make up half the recipe if I'm not going to need much. After I
finished covering the top, I worked my way
around the rim. I overlapped
the pieces about a quarter inch, but if there were thin spots, it was easy
enough to patch those by pulling off a piece of the paper and pasting it on.
The patches smooth easily and are invisible. It's important, I found out,
to remove the edges of the paper. Even though they're deckle edged, the
straight line always seemed to show where they overlapped, but the ragged torn
ones didn't. After the hat was
fully covered, I painted over the whole outside surface with the starch,
then the hat went on top of a basket to allow air circulation, and was left to
dry the rest of the day. The paper shrinks as it dries, but because it's
formed on the outside of the straw hat, the shrinkage is just enough so that it
becomes the same size as the form. Just before it was completely dry, my
husband tried it on to make sure it fit. (At that point, if it hadn't, I
could have dampened the rim inside slightly and stretched it.) I had
several ideas for hatbands, but JimT suggested a band of the hickory bark from
which the paper was made. I wasn't about to argue with him, mainly because
it was a good idea. (Why didn't I think of it?) Here are two shots
of the finished hat -- one from head on
and the other from the side.
Of the three hats, I think his is the best. Because of the irregular
variations in color, it looks a lot like brushed suede.
My husband is a writer and his
hat looks very...well...writerly. :)
Back to the top
7-5-04 I'm still trying to get
rid of small batches of old pulp. Today I finally just mixed everything
except some underbeaten torch ginger all into
one mass, then bleached the mixed pulp. I pulled the interior card from
this, then added a pinch of the torch ginger fibers to give the outside card a
nicer visual texture. Before I pressed the outside cards, I added (from
the top) squares of agrimony, linden bast
and weathered iris paper. Each square was lightly touched with starch
in one or two spots on the back, then arranged on the wet base sheet. When
pressed, these squares seat firmly into the paper and become a part of it, so
much so that you can't even feel an edge. They're stuck there. You
can't pop them loose or peel them off.
7-6-04 Some time back MJ sent
me a sheet made from a type of bracket mushroom. Beautiful soft stuff with
an almost suede-like feel to it. I'd love to duplicate it, but finding the
right bracket mushroom may be impossible. With the exception of morels (dryland
fish), I'm not big on identifying fungi. Until now, there didn't seem to
be much reason to know, unless I was planning on eating the mushroom. I
only have one book on fungi, and though the pictures are excellent, the book
doesn't cover a great number of species. My next door neighbor has a red
maple stump in his front yard that is a veritable mushroom paradise when the
weather is wet. This morning when I examined it, there were no less than
eight different types growing on it. Haven't the faintest Idea what they
were, though. There were several of
a nice bracket or shelf type
that I harvested to try in the blender. (I have no idea what variety of
mushroom it is and any help would be welcome.) Because they were fresh and
reasonably soft, I didn't soak them, just cut in chunks and ran through the
blender. The resulting "pulp" didn't look especially promising. I
can only describe it as a thick, milky tan gruel that stank like...like...I
dunno...just not a very pleasant odor. There was only enough of this stuff
for two poured sheets, one thin
and one thick. This is weird,
weird stuff. It's as translucent as if it had been painted with beeswax.
It's even possible to see my
fingers through the heavy sheet when it's front lit. And not
only does it look like it has been coated with beeswax, it feels
like it. It's almost like plastic. Weird. And did I mention
odor? It's still there.
7-8-04 Rules bother me if they
are stated as hard fast "laws" with no explanation for their reason.
Written that way, they stifle creativity. They create concern, if not fear, about
stretching boundaries by breaking or bending those rules. Now granted, there are
some that should not be broken, if for no other reason than
safety's sake, and those should be stated firmly, but even then, their reason
for existing should be offered so there would be no question about why they should not be
broken. As for the rest of the rules, I'd rather view them as guidelines
and see them written to include information that "if you do this, then..." and "if you do
not, then...:" Give me the information and let me judge whether I wish to
accept the consequences of breaking them.
7-9-04 I finally got around to
doing something with the piece I
created over a plastic bag last month. I wanted to try it as a
luminary, but finding lighting fixtures around here was impossible.
Jan
Moulder helped me locate a source. (I appreciate the help, Jan.)
Obviously the piece had to have a mount for the fixture, but I didn't want this
to be obvious. I cut a circle from 1/4" plywood with a 1" hole in which to
insert the light fixture. Because the bulb fixture and wire would extend
below the plywood, I cut a rim from
3/4" pine for a base to raise the piece, making room for the fixture beneath
the base and cut a slot in the pine rim for the cord to pass through. I
attached this base to the paper piece with PVA glue. This was all well and
good and quite solid, but the wood
showed. I didn't care for that at all. Fortunately, I had frozen
the wet paper sheets I had used to create the piece, knowing that I might need
them again. I thawed those, then
covered the wood with some of the
light colored paper and extended that paper onto the surrounding surface.
This further solidified the base. In the finished base, the cord is coiled
within the circle and a bent piece of plastic holds the cord in place in the
slot. I tried both 4 watt
and 15 watt bulbs in the
piece. (The lower wattage picture is reasonably accurate. The
interior lighting in the 15 watt shot comes across as far more glaring than it
actually is.) Depending on surrounding lighting, either wattage can be
used. After I put the light in, I did find four or five pinholes that
weren't visible even looking from the inside out. Those were easily
patched with matching bits from the thawed paper. Hey, I thought four or
five pinholes wasn't bad, given the number of pieces that went into this and the
random manner in which they were assembled.
Back to the top
7-13-04 I made the mistake of
commenting a few weeks ago to my husband that, despite the intense storms the
region has suffered, we've had few here in Berea. That was a mistake.
Today's 72 MPH winds made me want to eat those words. The storm took down
trees that had withstood the tornado in '96. The damage here at the house
wasn't that bad, just limbs, but still, not a fun thing. I spent much of
the day cleaning up stuff, but couldn't resist playing around with part of the
plant material brought down by the storm. I steamed the Tree of Heaven leaf stems (some of
them over 3' long) to see if I could get the sheath off, but it turned out to be
more trouble than it was worth, so those went into the compost heap. Set a
pot of hickory bast on to cook for beating tomorrow.
7-14-04 When I rinsed the
hickory this morning, I found four hard chips that definitely weren't done.
Weird. Well cooked hickory crushes from the ends easily and begins to
separate, but this stuff wouldn't crush at all. Fortunately, I discovered
the problem in the first handful that went into the beater and checked it all
after that. In the past, I've only cooked up a pound to beat, but this
time I cooked the full 1.25 pounds. As it turns out, this is too much of
this particular fiber for the beater. The overload in the beater wasn't
noticeable until the chunks broke
down. Then the mass of fibers balked at the bend and didn't want to go
round and back under the drum. I ended up taking out about 2 oz.
After that, it ran without problems. **There are vines growing up in a
neighbor's hemlock tree that look reasonably interesting for paper, just don't know what
they are. I do know they die to the ground each fall and either come up
again the next year or come up from seeds. The
leaves are triangular with
lobes, palmately veined with the veins being purple at the base. The
vine stem is purple streaked on one
side and green on the other. The vines are blooming right now, small
clusters of white flowers well up into the tree. I pulled several of the
vines down but they broke before I could reach the flowers for a picture.
The stems have a soft, meaty green center. The outside of the vine is
smooth and fibrous and worth a try.
7-15-04 Cut the vine and set
it on to cook while I pulled some heavy hickory sheets for a couple of baskets. The first one was a honeysuckle and hosta leaf stem
basket begun a couple of years ago but never finished. I had started
this particular basket mainly to pass time and had no real direction for it in
mind. Things like
that sometime don't get finished. The sides were done, and the center run
was all that was lacking. I saw it in the garage the other day and brought
it in, figuring to finish it with with a paper strip. There is no picture
of the basket before I began, but this
is after one run of hickory paper on one side, and
this is after filling the majority
of the bottom. These are shots of the
front,
inside and a
shot from the top of the finished
basket. I'm well pleased with the way it worked out. The paper is
hard, stiff, solid and tough. It looks almost like wet leather that has shrunken
an dried against the
basket's ribs. **I tried to process the cooked vine in the blender, and
though it will make paper, it really should be done in a beater. It took
so long to break down in the blender that I didn't even process enough to pull a single sheet.
I won't be gathering any more. The pulp just didn't
look all that promising.
Back to the top
7-16-04 Today's project was two baskets of a
different type from the other. I was a basketmaker before becoming a papermaker.
I discovered today that I still have a basketmaker's mindset. To
explain... Woven baskets almost invariably begin at the bottom and finish
at the opening. That's the nature of the process. With the first piece this morning, I created a
form around which to mold it, then without giving a thought to the entire
process, I
began with the bottom. (The
basket was to be small. The circle of 1/4" wood exists to help form a flat bottom
and to give the piece weight. It is covered on both sides with the paper)
I had intended to form the wet paper
around the plastic, working upward, then attach this to the honeysuckle rim.
All was well and good until I reached
the stage of attaching the rim. Fooling with the limp, wet paper was a
pill. It quickly became obvious after
attaching the first side that putting a rim on this was going to be impossible. The first side
of the paper attached to the rim
easily enough, but moving the rim to attach the second side mangled and
unattached the first side. I fumbled with this until it hit me that it
really would have been far easier to begin with the rim when movement wouldn't
have been an issue. Had to let go of the idea of putting a rim on this one.
Instead I formed it into a pouch by
rolling the rim, attached a cord of twisted paper and let it dry. At some
point in the next couple of days, I'll put another layer of paper over the
outside to shape it just a little better and smooth the surface. (Here is
a picture of the pouch after the
second layer.) **I'm a
quick study. The second basket
began at the top. The rim is twisted honeysuckle. I played with the
twists by attaching the paper over first one, then the other coil so that
the rim is solid but isn't continuous.
It wasn't possible to cover the entire form at once, so
it went this far today. I'll
cover the rest tomorrow, then see where to go from there.
7-19-04 I covered the bottom
of the basket day before yesterday, let it dry, then added another layer
yesterday and left it to dry until today. Before I removed the packing
from the inside, I added six Japanese
maple leaves randomly scattered around the top beneath the rim to give the
outside of the basket a little life. This was done by brushing the top
area of the basket with the cooked starch, allowing this to become tacky,
smoothing the leaves onto the surface, then brushing over them with another
layer of the starch. After the attached leaves had dried well, I removed
the Wal-Mart bag full of Styrofoam peanuts. When I looked inside, I
discovered that I'd bought a lesson the hard way.
The printing on the sides of the bag
had stuck to the inside of the basket and stayed there when the bag was
removed. Erk! Lesson: Do not use Wal-Mart
bags right side out, or better yet, don't use them at all, use tall kitchen
garbage bags which have no printing. I wasn't horribly disturbed by what
happened, and as it turned out, this may actually have been a good thing to
happen. I had planned, if the inside of the basket were rough, to cover it
with another layer of the bleached hickory, but with the printing, I wasn't
certain one layer would cover the dark black printing. That made me think
about using some other figured paper inside, rather than just the white, to
better camouflage the problem. I had some leftover sheets in the freezer
from the pumpkin/roasted pepper
doololly I did last month, so I thawed them out, tore them into pieces and
used that inside the basket. I'm well pleased with the result and actually
like it better than just the plain white inside. (For some reason, there
is almost always more to be gained from mistakes than is lost.) The varied
colors and textures on the inside are visible
both from on top and from a side
view. When these pictures were taken, the inside was still slightly
damp. The colors in the dried piece are more subdued.
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