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journal |
September 2004 |
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9-7-04 For some reason, I tend to be a one-project person. I multitask small jobs well, but larger ones involve me so deeply that I don't often tackle more than one at a time. For the last little bit I've been working on a website for the local arts organization. It's up temporarily here. The site is plain, no frills and thrills, partly to keep load time down, but mainly because I will be handing this over to the Council to take care of as soon as possible. I figure if the site is simple, this will happen sooner rather than later. **A few days ago I noticed these bracket or shelf mushrooms growing on a stump across the street. When I asked if I could have them, the neighbor offered both the fungi and the stump. I declined the latter. This morning after last night's rains softened them, I harvested all but the smallest of them. The lot weight nearly 3 pounds. With more rain from the remnants of hurricane Frances on the way, there is no way to do anything with them, so the bag went into the freezer. 9-9-04 3.25" of rain later...... Today I thawed out the fungi and soaked them. Stinky stuff! The odor is earthy and strong and not at all to my taste. I wouldn't want to work with this stuff all the time. Ugh! Because these shelf fungi were growing so close to the ground, they had grown out and around the grass, especially those that were growing from the roots three and four feet from the tree. Removing the blades of grass was nearly impossible. Some would pull out of the fungus, but for the most part, they broke off. I don't know what effect these will ultimately have on the sheets. There has been quite a thread on the papermaking list lately about mushroom paper. Everyone has been writing about how soft, sensuous and even sexy the shelf fungus sheets are. This had me a bit perplexed. I tried it before, only once, but the result was far from suede like. The sheets I pulled then looked and felt just as if they had been coated with beeswax. Unfortunately, I didn't take a picture of that shelf fungus before harvesting, and honestly don't remember exactly what it looked like. (This is what lack of proper record keeping gets you.) This time I do have a record, and I can say that this particular fungus harvested at this particular stage yields lovely, soft, suede like...yes, even sexy sheets. They drape across my hand in soft, cool, sensuous folds, much like very thin suede. Neat stuff!! Well, neat all except for the odor of the pulp. This odor does dissipate when the sheets are dry. (I'll mention here that these sheets are not true paper. Paper is composed of cellulose fibers. The material that makes up these is chitin. I think sometimes I'm almost anal about what is/isn't paper. But using the same language/the same definitions is important when sharing information. It helps to assure that there are no misunderstandings.) 9-10-04 I mentioned yesterday that sheets made from the shelf fungi weren't paper because they were made from chitin, not cellulose. I poked around a little on the Web this afternoon and found a really interesting page about chitin on the University of Southern Mississippi site. It discusses in simple terms the close similarity between chitin and cellulose. It also lists other things that contain chitin, among them squid, octopi, spiders, worms and cockroaches. (Just think, we could be making sheets from cockroaches and spiders! Yeah, right...) Anyway, I found the information interesting. 9-15-04 The last couple of days I've been working on a guest book for Dorothy Tredennick's 90th birthday party. (Dorothy is the woman who attempted to teach me sumi-e last year. And bless her heart, she did try and try hard, but I was a poor student. For me, controlling the brush was impossible and sumi-e truly does take absolute control. The first stroke must be right because there is no going back and correcting. Unfortunately, there must be an unbridgeable gap between my mind and my hand. I could not make the two work together) Anyway, last week I was contacted and asked if I would make a book for Dorothy's birthday party, and it is a definite pleasure to do it. Because it is a guest book, I chose Coptic for the binding so the book would lie flay. Dorothy's taste in art runs toward subtle, and for the cover I tried to play to that. It is made from a thick sheet of a cotton rag/abaca mixture with a smattering of torch ginger fibers swirling through it. Into this I imprinted two ginkgo leaves, one above the other. (I know that's odd lighting in the picture, but full face-on lighting burned the leaves out.) Here is a close-up of one of the leaves. The cover for the hinge area is hickory bast paper, as is the back cover. There are five signatures of three sheets of folded 8.5"x11" commercial #70 natural linen. Each signature is covered with a sheet of the cotton rag/abaca paper with a little more torch ginger than is used on the cover. 9-17-04 It's been raining for the last couple of days, but Hurricane Ivan finally came through this morning. Hard rains and more than a little wind. One of my favorite old trees a couple of blocks from here went down...on both sides of the street. **By afternoon the sky had cleared and I was able to start on some stationery for a swap that I'd like to participate in. My assistant sat on the envelopes to keep them from blowing away. (Ran across an appropriate quote last night: "In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods, they have never forgotten this." ~ Alfred Whitehead) 9-20-04 I should have my head examined. A woman from the local Farmer's Market offered me some flax plants this afternoon...and I took them. I don't have room to store the plants that I have already gathered, and I won't be able to ret and hackle these plants until next spring. Sick! Papermakers are, very honestly, sick in the head...at least this one. 9-21-04 I went down to give blood today. Both arms show deep purple evidence of my good intentions, but good intentions was all I had. No blood. This also meant no heavy lifting the rest of the day. I'd forgotten that. I had meant to beat up some hemp, but that will have to wait until tomorrow now. 9-22-04 This time of year I begin thinking about cleaning pulp out the refrigerator and reclaiming the crisper. It's so strange. I always have small bags of this and that - a dab of hickory, a bit of daylily, a little torch ginger - most of which I mix together, then bleach. Almost without fail, the resulting paper is beautiful. And this is not a planned beautiful, just something that happens. And if I'm careful about what I mix and the proportions, the quality of the paper is good, as well. This year I had quite a bit of underbeaten hickory in the refrigerator. If this had been added "as is," it would have diminished the quality, but it was easy enough to go ahead and run the hickory through a blender to create a much finer pulp before mixing it in. At some point over the next few days, I'll pull this mixed batch of pulp into envelopes, cards and stationery just to be rid of it. 9-23-04 My neighbor grows okra, and all summer he has kept us supplied in the pods. This year I've eaten more of the stuff than I have since I grew it myself on the farm. Today he brought over the green stalks he had uprooted from his garden. This wasn't exactly what I had planned, but.... I really wish it weren't necessary to steam stalks to get bast off, and particularly okra. Steaming okra stalks increases the slime factor many times over. It's possible to slide a knife down the stalk to remove strips, but they're so narrow and the stalks so irregular that it would take forever and there would be too much waste. I did do a few strips from the base of one stalk to get a picture of the unusual growth design of the bast fibers. It looks ever so much like a green tree snake. The green areas between the strips are fiberless goo that are slick even before steaming or cooking. I steamed and stripped the stalks, but now I'm left with a problem. I really don't want to cook and beat the stuff this fall. Instead, I would rather hold this until next spring, but I don't know whether to dry the strips or freeze them. 9-29-04 Earlier this month I did sheets from a bracket or shelf fungus. Neat stuff. I have my eye on another type of bracket fungus that is growing on the woodpile, but there really isn't enough of it to try yet. I'm hoping that it will grow or I will find additional ones like it somewhere. However, this morning I noticed several bunches of mushrooms (not the bracket type) growing beside the woodpile, and just out of curiosity, I gathered them. The underneath sides were honeycombed with gills. These are are considerably more fragile than the bracket fungus, more like grocery store mushrooms. Several times the question has been asked on the papermaking list whether mushrooms, such as those from a grocery, can be used to form sheets, and always the answer has been "no." I was reasonably sure, after tearing these yellow ones apart, that they wouldn't form sheets, either, but I had to try anyway. They pulped in the blender into a "soup" that smelled much like that from the bracket fungus. I poured one very nice 6"x9" sheet, drained, couched and foot pressed it between boards. The very nice 6"x9" sheet immediately became a 9"x 12" irregularly distorted sheet, and when I tried to remove the top couching cloth, this is what happened. So...now I know, and know exactly why this type mushroom will not form sheets. So much for that.
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