What would your friends page be like without a bowl of the day post from me. :)

I made this one a week ago. I had some dried calendula flowers and I wanted to use them in the bowl. The inside worked out beautifully, but the outside was odd. All the calendula dried crispy brown, even affecting the paper around it so that it looked like it had been dried in an oven and crisped! It really didn't look appealing, but I didn't want to scrap the bowl because the inside looked terrific.

So I painted the outside in gold paint before I finished it with mod podge. It worked out well!

I've been working on a series of bowls as thank-you presents for the people who have been so good to us in San Francisco. This is for A, who gave us a ride home from T's party. She said she liked turquoise and black. Black is a tough color, because very little junk mail comes on black paper. :) So I used some heavily printed paper and didn't blend it as long, so it would stay chunky and you'd see the black more.

I have a lot of photos to display, but I forgot to transfer them this morning. Hopefully I will do that tonight.

In the meantime, here's a bowl I made the week before we went to San Francisco in April. I used two different colors of green paper and an oak leaf paper punch to create the details. I like it because the flyers I used to create the oak leaves were heavily printed and so a lot of the printing still shows in the final bowl.

In a previous post, I wrote a tutorial on how to make handmade paper from junk mail. If you've never made paper before, you should read over that post, because the first step to making a paper bowl is to create a stack of paper. For the small bowls that I make, I need about 8-9 sheets. For the bowl in this picture, I need about 20 sheets.


The metal bowl will be the mould that I use for creating the paper bowl. Select one made of metal or glass, and make sure it has a smooth surface on the outside. Many bowls have a rim on the bottom so that they will lie flat on a table. This will not work well for a mould, as you will see. The can I'm holding is mould release spray; I've read that Pam cooking spray works fine too, though I've been hesitant to try it, thinking it will leave oily residue on the paper. But it certainly would be a lot less expensive. I bought my mould release spray from papermaking.net. And the pile of handmade paper is stacked between shop towels in the right hand side of the photo. Note that they are still wet. They are freshly made, and should not be allowed to dry before making the bowl.


Tear the sheets into smaller pieces. I like to make very thick paper when I'm making paper bowls; it tears more easily and it's more sturdy. And I'll have to make fewer sheets, too.










Tear up two or three sheets before continuing. The mould release spray can instructions state that you should spray the mould immediately before laying down the casting, and having a stack of paper ready to go is best.

Spray the mould. Make sure the whole thing gets covered, especially the rim.








Now you're ready to start making the bowl. Each sheet of paper has two sides to it: one side that shows the screening of the paper mould, and one side that shows the texture of the shop towel. I think the texture of the shop towel is more appealing than the screening, so I lay the torn pieces of paper with the towel-texture down. Overlap the pieces as you go. Pat the seams down with your fingers. Make sure all of the bowl gets covered.

After the first layer is done, switch over to laying the torn pieces of paper with the towel-texture up. The outside of the bowl will end up have towel-texture showing too.

Use at least three layers of paper to make your bowl. If you only use one or two, your bowl will be very flexible. You want a bowl that will be sturdy.

After all three-plus layers have been laid on the bowl, take a sponge and carefully press down over the entire surface of the bowl. With pressure, you are creating a smooth surface to the inside of the bowl, and binding the three layers of paper together into one strong layer. Water will flow from the pressure; just keep wringing out the sponge and keep going until you feel all the seams are strong and the paper has been pressed as hard as it can.


After the sponging, the bowl looks like this. Notice it still looks wet; it is still quite wet. Let it dry in front of a fan for at least 24 hours. Do not skimp on the time. If you pop it off too early and it's still wet inside, it may stick.










If you sprayed it well, you should be able to separate the bowl from the mould by just pulling the two apart with some gentle pressure. If it refuses to give at first, just keep turning the bowl around and try from a different angle.










This is what the bowl looks like fresh off the mould. I made it with old bank statements, old credit card statements, and old utility bills. I also shredded some multicolor flower petals, which shredded into the threads you see in the paper, and added some irridescent confetti for some shine.







At this point, I give each bowl two coats of matte Mod Podge, to seal in all the confetti and flower petals so that they don't peel off the surface of the bowl with handling. This is what the bowl looks like after the Mod Podge; it's a little darker than the raw bowl, and has a bit more of a sheen to it.








The surprise with this bowl was the surface of the outside of the bowl; it looked so different than the inside, and that is quite unusual! The green freckles formed, I believe, from the seeds that were in the flower heads. I don't know why they ended up mostly on the outside papers and not on the inside. There's a mystery to every bowl! This photo was taken after the two coats of Mod Podge, too.

So, there's your tutorial! Give it a try, ask questions, and I'll do my best to address them.

I made two bowls at a time over the weekend, trying to create a good supply for the craft fair in two weeks. This next bowl is done on a different cast than the one I usually use, so it's a different size than I usually make. I blended yellow papers with purple flowers (the same purple flowers I used in the white bowl), and the purple flowers broke down into fibers.



Again, though, dark blotches on the inside where the paper contacts the mould release spray. But I've learned my lesson. Just leave it alone. It actually looks pretty interesting, with the two-toned effect. It's much darker than the outside. I do like how the fibers extend past the rim of the bowl.






One surprise: green dots! You'll see it more in the bowl I'll be showing in the tutorial. Something about blending the flowers causes a series of green dots to appear in the paper. You don't see it when the bowl is wet, but by the time it dries, there are green freckles throughout the bowl's surface. On this bowl, they tend to blend in with the mustard-color nicely. In the tutorial bowl, they are much more obvious.





Viewed from the side, one notices that the bowl is not very even in height. But hey, that's what happens with handmade things, right? :)

I would have loved this one, but unfortunately the mould release spray left a dark blotch on the inside of the bowl (at least, that's what I'm blaming for the blotch; I really can't think of what else it could be). I tried to sand it out, but I ended up making a mess. I tried to patch it, and it doesn't look too bad, but I definitely should have left it alone and not tried to sand off the dark part. You can see a little of my patch job on the inside of the bowl, and toward the left in the picture.

I'm almost done with the bowl tutorial; I'm off to take the last photos now, and I will post it tomorrow night.

Last week when I posted the photos of the blue dragonfly bowl, someone wanted me to make her one in pink, with purple dragonflies. She offered to trade money for it! I like money. :) So I made this bowl for her, and she bought it, and the white and purple bowl also displayed in my journal last week. Thanks, Kathryn! I hope you enjoy both of them.



I took more pictures for the bowl tutorial; hopefully I can finish that up tonight or tomorrow.

I spent a lot of time making paper this weekend. Here is a little orange bowl that I made. It was mostly made of yellow trash paper from a friend and some orange trash paper I brought home from work. I added a little gold glitter to the pulp, but that may not be visible in the photo.



I also worked on some photos for a bowl-making tutorial, which hopefully I can finish tomorrow when the bowl is dry and I can take the last photos.

I just finished this bowl yesterday, and it may already have a new home! Here are the photos.












































The basic bowl was made with old credit card and bank statements; I was cleaning out my financial files and decided anything older than my last two street addresses was really not necessary any more. The purple flowers are called angels wings; they bled a teeny bit in the water, but I'm really impressed at how well they kept their color in the whole papermaking process.

I made two bowls in the past few weeks that came out pretty nice. You may remember that I made a bunch of origami boxes from three auction catalogs recently. Origami needs square sheets of paper, and the catalogs are 8.5"x11", so I trimmed the bottoms off each sheet to make 8.5"x8.5" squares for the boxes. I had a stack of these rectangular 2.5"x8.5" pieces of paper, and I puzzled what I might do with them.

I have a paper punch that makes confetti shaped like fir trees. I ran some of the trimmed paper through the paper punch, and made a big pile of fir trees, and then added paper pulp to it. I used some white, some cream, and some black tissue paper that I had lying around, and added a little bit of silver glitter to the mix.



The result was a really lovely gray bowl, if you're into gray bowls. I personally really like the texture on the inside, with the little trees showing in the pulp. I did use some glitter paint on the outside of the bowl to perk it up a little, but there's no disguising that it's a gray bowl. And some people may sniff at it, saying it looks like old cardboard or something, but I really like it and that's all that matters. :)

I did like the paper punch idea enough to use another paper punch shaped like a dragonfly on a different project. I had some strips of dark blue construction paper left over from someone's art project years ago; I made a big pile of dragonflies from the dark blue paper, and added them to blue, lavender, white, and pink pulp. I even pulped the leftover dark blue paper after the dragonflies were punched out; they made some lovely dark blue specks in the pulp.



This one is one of my favorites. I really like how the colors blended together.

Both bowls are available for trade, if anyone is interested!

I received three catalogs in the mail this week, all from the same auction house. It was a stamp dealer, and their catalogs were beautifully illustrated with color photos of antique envelopes and postcards with stamps. I couldn't bear to just throw them out, so I recycled them into origami boxes!


The book, and some of the boxes I've made. The book is "Origami Boxes" by Tomoko Fuse.













More boxes.

The three catalogs had covers that were a little thicker than the pages of the catalog. Since a triangular box is created from six sheets of paper, I made one triangular box with the six cover pages. It's very sturdy and it looks great!










Two triangular boxes - the one made from the covers is on the left













Inside the triangular box and its lid













The octagonal one was the most intricate one to assemble; it looks pretty neat from the inside.

In the first two photos, you see two sizes of four-sided boxes. The taller ones are made from four sheets of paper, and the shorter ones are made from eight. The shorter ones were my favorite to make; they came together so easily and crisply, and they are a good size for gift boxes. (The triangular boxes are a close second.)



The boxes on the left are bottoms. The boxes on the right are lids. So you can see the diamond shape on the inside of the bottom, and the overlapping squares on the inside of the lid.












The colors on this box made it my favorite. You're looking into the box on the left, and the top of its lid on the right.










This is the same box; you're looking at the underneath of the box on the left, and the inside of the lid on the right.

I posted previously about having bad luck with a two-colored bowl sticking to the mould despite using a mould release spray. I had been suspicious at the time that it was more of a problem with the paper that I was using (and perhaps not waiting long enough for it to dry thoroughly before popping it off the mould) than the use of the release spray, and was determined to try again. Last weekend, I made a reddish-purple bowl, using a metal bowl sprayed with the mould release spray. I used between 9 and 12 sheets of paper to make it, and it came out quite nice and sturdy. The inside was especially smooth, though slightly discolored by the release spray. (I think the discoloration mostly went away after it dried off the mould for a while.) It needed a little coaxing at the rim before coming off the mould; that was probably due to the fact that I didn't spray thoroughly enough down near the rim. I was thinking that the bowl needed a little jazzing up, so I pulled out some children's glitter paint that I bought last weekend at an arts and crafts store. The paint I have is in a very thick gel, so I used half the bottle to paint the inside of the bowl. It was like trying to paint with bubble gum or something. I used a gold glitter paint, because I had put some gold glitter in the reddish-purple paper pulp and I thought it might make the gold glitter in the bowl stand out more. So here's my bowl, after its gold glitter wash: I really like it, but I'd be willing to trade it to a good home if one of you likes it more!

I tried making a two-colored bowl - gold on the inside, and purple on the outside, with copper flecks added to the purple. I formed it on a stainless steel mixing bowl, and had trouble getting it to separate from the bowl after it dried. I had to take a knife and work it in between the paper and the bowl to pop it off, and caused some damage to the bowl around the edge. I cut down the sides of the bowl to take off the damage and salvage the rest, so now it's a much shallower bowl than I thought it would be. And I didn't get the rim even. But still, it's not bad. It's really thick and sturdy, and the inside texture is very smooth. I'll have to get a picture of it.

I bought some mould release spray from papermaking.net - supposedly, if you spray the mould with this stuff, it will make popping the paper casting off the mould much easier. It worked well on small flat castings, like the shortbread heart molds, so I had hopes it would work on the stainless steel mixing bowl. I formed another two-colored bowl - cream on the inside, and dark purple on the outside, with glitter in both layers.

At first, it looked like there was no great advantage to spraying the mould - it was still stuck around the rim. So I worked a razor blade in there, and broke the seal. But when I slid the bowl off the mold, the cream layer stuck to the stainless steel bowl and only the purple layer popped out! I tried a second time with the exact same results. Now the purple bowl has flecks of cream paper stuck around its rim. I'll paint the inside of it so that I don't have to destroy it completely.

I think the problem was with the cream paper I used, not the mould release spray. I've had trouble with that paper before. I don't know why it's so different in texture than other kinds of paper; it looks just like regular cream-colored photocopier paper. I had gotten a whole stash of it from a friend a while back; it had been pages from an appointment notebook, and I really like the color. But it just doesn't have the same amount of stickiness that other papers have. I suspect it just didn't adhere well to the purple paper and the mold release spray had nothing to do with the layers pulling apart.

Ah well, I'll try again in the next few weeks. I'll try a single-color bowl this time, without that problem cream paper, to see if the mould release spray works better than not spraying the mould first.

I got two pieces of mail recently with handmade envelopes ... one from S and one from G. It really pleased me to see them, because I don't see them that often! I love making envelopes from my junk mail. I look for thicker, colorful pieces, like the glossy covers on magazines or mail order catalogs. Some high-quality mail order catalogs are all that thicker, glossy paper, and I have made envelopes out of every page.


This is the template I use for making envelopes. I bought it years ago from a company that doesn't exist any more, but it's easy enough to make your own. Just take a regular envelope of the size you'd like to make, and slice it open on all its seams with a razor blade. Trace it out onto cardboard, and cut it out.

The large flap I'm holding will make the inside body of the envelope. The shorter flap opposite it will make the closing flap. (I'm only pointing this out because all my early envelopes were not made that way - I thought the large flap was the closing flap! Oops.)

I like the commercial templates better than handmade ones because they are made of milkbottle plastic, and thus are a little bit translucent. So if you're trying to get a particular design on the paper centered onto the envelope, it's really easy to see right throught the template and center it perfectly. It's a little harder with cardboard.

Draggin Ink sells lots of wonderful templates, and they are only a few dollars each. I've ordered from them before, and the quality is really nice.


Trace around the outside of the template onto the piece of paper you want to use for the envelope. If the paper is wider or longer than the template, just continue the lines out to the border and make the flaps larger. You can see my template has slits in it to ink out the folding lines. If you make a template, don't bother trying to put those in. If you ink in the folding lines, you'll still see the ink lines on the finished envelope, which I find unsightly.

Another nice thing about this particular template is that it's easy to adapt it and make an envelope that is larger than the template. Trace out the top left corner, then slide the template to the right and trace out the top right corner. Put the template back in the top left corner, and then slide it down and trace out the bottom left corner. Then slide it to the right and trace out the bottom right corner. By sliding the template (and keep it lined up with the border of the paper) you are creating an envelope body that is wider or longer than the original template. The flaps will still be large enough to cover the larger envelope.


Cut out the envelope.













This is what the envelope looks like after I cut it out. Notice the side flaps and the body flap (the part on my hands) are longer than the template. I figure I might as well use as much of the paper as I can.











Fold the side flaps in, and then the body flap up and over side flaps.










I use Gluestick to seal the envelope side flaps to the body flap. I found a wet glue like Elmer's left wrinkles in the envelope flaps, and I didn't like how that looked. I also use a Gluestick to seal the envelope before I mail it.






Here are some envelopes that were made with this envelope template. Bored with using mail order catalogs for making envelopes? Used gift wrap and old road maps also make wonderful envelopes.

If the finished envelope has a light area where the address would go, you can certainly pen the address right onto the envelope, especially if you use a Sharpie or some other dark thick pen. We want the postal service to actually take our handmade envelopes and get them through the system! But if the envelope is dark, I will use a plain address label and pen the address on that. I used to do a lot of mailings with my laser printer, and I printed all the address labels onto label paper for the mailings. Label paper has 20 labels per page. Invariably, though, my mailing list would not have a perfect multiple of 20, so I'd have leftover labels on the last page. I saved all those last pages, and I use those blanks for my handmade envelopes.

Or you can use a silver metallic gel pen on those dark envelopes; I love the way those look!

I hope you try making your own envelopes; they're free and pretty and help reuse some of the waste paper that you shouldn't burn in your fireplace or may not be recyclable in your area.

I had to retape my paper mould today, so I took a few photos of the mould to give you an idea of how to make one yourself. (There are plenty of commercial papermaking kits for sale, if you don't want to make your own. Arnold Grummer's kits are very good. The technique for papermaking with the commercial kits is a little different than the one I demonstrated a few weeks ago with my handmade moulds. I learned on the handmade moulds, so it's still my preferred method.)

Excuse the paper pulp that has built up under the screen; if you put in extra staples closer to the inside edge, the screen will fit tighter on the frame and pulp won't be able to sneak underneath as much as it did here.

So you can see it's basically four pieces of 1"x1" wood, nailed at the corners, so that the inside dimension is the size of the paper you want to make. The mould pictured here measures 6"x9", so that means two pieces that are 6" long, and two pieces that are 11" long. Aluminum screening can be purchased in bulk at a Home Depot-type store, and then cut to size as you need it. Make sure you use aluminum screening, so that it doesn't rust or sag. (Window screening is too flexible for this job. Don't use it; it will sag immediately and your paper will crease when you press it out onto the shop cloth.) The screening is staple gunned onto the wood, and you can see that in the photo above.

As we've discussed already, paper pulp is very sticky. We need to put a border on the mould that is smooth and will give the handmade paper a feathery edge because the paper can't stick to the border. We use duct tape to make that smooth border. Tape over the stapled side, covering only up to the inside wood border. Don't cover more of the screen than that, or else your finished piece of paper won't be 6"x9" (or whatever size you were trying to make). Also, you don't want to expose the sticky portion of the tape to water, so extending the tape past the wood frame is a bad idea for that reason, too.

Take extra care to run your fingers hard over the duct tape, so that you can see the outline of the staples and the screening through the tape. That's done to keep the sticky part of the tape from being exposed to water. Otherwise you'll find the tape losing its stickiness and start lifting off the mould when it gets wet, and you'll have to pull it off and retape it. That's why I had to retape this mould; I didn't make sure it was taped securely before I used it.

This is a continuation of the papermaking tutorial I posed earlier this week. That tutorial got you as far as making the paper and hanging it to dry, but I realized I left out what you do next.

So you've left all this paper to dry. What do you do when it's dry?


This is what it looks like when it's dry. You can see it dries wavy, and not flat like you'd like it to be. Just iron it flat! Use a steam iron, and you can keep the paper on the shop cloth and iron through it, or peel the paper off the shop cloth and iron it directly. It won't burn or scorch, and the steam will flatten it right out. I like to iron the paper right on the shop cloth, because it makes the shop cloth all smooth and ready for making another batch of paper.

Now in your Rubbermaid bin, you've got leftover paper pulp floating in water. What do you do with it? You don't want to pour it down the sink, because it will clog your sink eventually. I've even clogged a toilet once, flushing the pulp. The easiest thing to do is to take the bin outside and water your compost pile with the pulpy water, or water your garden or a tree with it. You'll see some pulp on the mulch or on the ground, but it will disappear quickly.

If you don't have any landscaping to water, you'll want to filter the pulpy water through an old pair of pantyhose, or a pillow case, or some cheesecloth, or something like that. The water can go down the drain, but you want to hold the pulp back. Squeeze the water out of the pulp to condense it into a nice little paperball.

You can save the pulp and run it through the blender again and keep making more paper the next day. But if you won't be using it within a few days, freeze or refrigerate the paperball; it does tend to get smelly left at room temperature.

Or you can use the pulp to make paper castings.


These are two shortbread moulds that I bought at a yard sale for a buck. If I have a lot of pulp left over, I press it into one of the moulds and use a sponge to pack it in tight and to squeeze as much water out of them as I can. Because they are deep and a lot of paper pulp fits into one mould, I let them dry for at least several days before popping them out of the mould. If I pop them out too early and they aren't dry all the way, they develop a curve to them. I do want to keep them as flat as I can.




These are a few of the castings I've made with one of the shortbread moulds. After they've dried, I trim off any excess around the edges with scissors.

The trouble is, I don't know what to do with all these casted hearts! I've got quite a few ... any creative ideas?

A friend suggested that I use Mod Podge to finish my paper bowls. Last night, I put two coats, inside and outside, on two of my paper bowls. Even though I used a matte finish Mod Podge, it does make the bowls less matte than they had been without a finish. And it definitely made them stronger, though I'm sure I wouldn't want to turn them into fruit bowls. I don't think they'd be strong enough for that much weight.

Still, I'm pleased with how they turned out. I like the Mod Podge; it reminds me of Elmer's glue in consistency. I used a sponge applicator rather than a brush, and I'm glad I did; even with the sponge applicator, I'm constantly picking out little flecks from the applicator. I can just imagine how annoying it would be if the brush was dropping bristles in the Mod Podge. (I'm drying the bowls on a Handi-wipe, and they are picking up fibers from the cloth when they are laid on their brims to have the bottoms dry.)

I'm not sure the second coat made much of a difference one way or another, so I think I'll just use one coat on the next two bowls and see how they turn out. I also bought a small container of a matte varnish while I was at the arts & crafts store; maybe I'll try that as the second coat on the next two bowls and see what kind of a difference that makes.

Two of the last bowls I made were significantly thicker than the earlier bowls I made. Even raw, they don't flex. So I think that is a key bit of learning. Making them thicker is good. I want to try a two-color bowl next time, with the inside being a different color paper than the outside. I haven't decided whether to go with two shades of the same color, like a dark blue bowl with a lighter blue interior, or whether to pick two different colors, like a dark blue bowl with a gold interior. Either way, it will be a fun project.

I sent a friend some of my handmade paper, and she is going to try and do some Polaroid transfers onto them. She asked if handmade paper could get wet, and I answered that I thought it could, but I hadn't done it so I didn't know for sure. But that answer niggled at me; I felt certain that it had been tried. This weekend I was browsing around my paper studio, and the memory I had been trying to recall suddenly broke free.

Years ago, I did a craft trade, similar to what I did with this friend, but with a man who did marbling. He sent me back four sheets of my own paper with marbling on it, so I know it's possible to get the paper wet and yet have it survive, since I know that basically marbling is done by floating paint on water and then laying paper on the painted water and lifting it back out again.



These are a little battered because I didn't store them well, but you get the general idea.

Do any of you do marbling? Can I trade with you to get some of my own paper back with marbling on it?

I usually just use my paper as is. I displayed some of my paper bowls in a previous post, and I'll display more of my paper art in future posts.

When I made the post a few days ago displaying some of the papermaking I've done in the past, I totally forgot about my paper bowls! Here are four that I have made. I made them using a glass or metal bowl for the form. I flip the bowl over so that the open part is on the countertop, and its rounded bottom is sticking up in the air. Make sure the bowl is very clean. I create the sheets of paper just like I posted a few days ago, but instead of leaving the wet sheets to dry, I take them off the shop towels while they are still wet and press them on the outside surface of the bowl. I like using glass bowls for the form, because then I can see through them when I hold them up to a window or a light and can tell if there is any weak points in the paper where it's not thick enough, and put a little more paper in that spot. If the bowl is very big, I'll use the whole paper sheet. If the bowl is small, I'll tear it into quarters or something like that, and use the pieces. Those are the same four bowls, showing them with their little bottoms in the air. Maybe it's a little clearer seeing from that angle how they were made. After the paper has been placed on the bowl, use a damp sponge and press it all over to make sure the paper has adhered well and is strong, and let it dry. The toughest part is getting the dry bowl to separate from the metal/glass bowl. Sometimes they stick, and all the work is for naught; when I try to take it off the form, it rips. :( That's why I said make sure it's a clean bowl. I found that if there was any residual paper from a previous bowl stuck on the surface of the bowl form, that caused things to stick. I keep getting tempted to spray the bowl form with one of those cooking sprays that keeps food from sticking in a frying pan, to see if that will help the separation anxiety, but I haven't done it. I keep thinking it will leave oily spots on the bowl, and most of the time I can get the bowl to separate from the form without tearing, so I don't have much incentive to be experimental. I haven't done anything to these four bowls to finish them off, like varnishing them, to make them strong enough to hold something sturdy. Again, not sure how it will work and I don't want to trash one as an experiment. Any suggestions of something that will work? I'd be more adventurous if I had a good recommendation!

I'm having trouble with uploading photos, so I can't do the post I wanted to do. In the meantime, here's a question I have of other people reading this journal. Has anyone done papier mache before? I haven't done it since I was a kid, and I can't remember what it was like, except that it was strips of newspaper in a sticky liquid. Specifically, I wonder why we used newspaper, and whether it would work nicely with handmade paper or regular old junk mail or even mail order catalogs. If it does, I wonder why the teachers always teach on newspaper? Seems like kids would enjoy the colors of mail order catalogs, and it would be a lot prettier. Another paper art I'd like to do sometime is paper quilling. I've seen some lovely paper beads using the general technique, and I want to do that!

In my previous post on papermaking, I showed you the work area, the supplies needed, and the finished product. In this post, I'll talk more about how hand papermaking is done, though I don't know if it will be enough detail for you to go out and make your own flawless paper.


I have a small paper shredder in my office. The plastic bag next to the blender in this photo has the shredded paper in it. I filled the blender jar about 3/4 of the way with warm water. (It was cold in the basement, and I didn't want to be sticking my hands in cold water. That's the only reason I used warm water; cold water works just as well.) Then I added two or three small handfuls of the shredded paper. Better to have too little than too much; you end up adding a blenderful or two of just water to the bin anyway to dilute the pulp, and you don't want to make your blender work too hard and burn itself out.




I blended the scraps for maybe 30 seconds, until I can hear that the blades aren't straining against clumps. When the blender stops and you peer at the pulp, it shouldn't look chunky. It should look more like a milkshake.










I pour the pulp into a Rubbermaid dish pan. This is a good size for the paper mould that I use (the mould I have makes sheets 6"x9" in size), and it's nice and deep. It takes about four blenders to get enough pulp in the bin, and as I said, I usually add another blenderful or two of water to make the pulp deep enough for maneuvering.







I handmake my paper moulds, but there are companies that offer ready-made ones that work fine too. This one is made with 1"x1" wood strips nailed into a rectangle. Aluminum screening is cut to fit and staple-gunned along the top of the rectangle. Duct tape is placed over the staples to create a smooth surface that won't cling to the paper. You'll get another view of the paper mould in the next few photos.






Keeping the staple-gunned surface on the top, push the paper mould into the water, and pull it up straight so that a layer of paper pulp forms on the top of the screen. If it is clumpy, or if you can see the screen through the pulp or if the screen is uncovered in some area, put the pulp back into the bin, mix it with your hand, and try pushing the paper mould back into the water and pulling it up again.







Hold the paper mould at an angle over the dish bin, and let some of the water run off. Use the sponge to gently press on the back side and take off more water. Don't push hard! The screen is only adhered by staples, and if you press hard, it will eventually weaken the staples. Squeeze out the sponge when it gets too wet, and dab at the back until you feel like you've taken off any water that drips.





The paper is pretty well adhered to the screen at this point. You can turn the paper mould upside down, and it won't slide off. So take your time, turn the paper mould over, center it over the shop cloth (previously placed on top of the towel) so that the paper side is pressed onto the shop cloth. You are separated from the paper by the screen. Press on the screen hard with a sponge, and push as much water as you can out of the paper and into the towel. The pressing is what causes your paper to be flat and sturdy, so press hard!



This is the trickiest part. Lift the paper mould just the tiniest bit off the towel. Just barely. And blow hard through the screen along the portion of the mould closest to you, until the paper starts to separate from the screen. If you lifted the mould too high, the paper may curl under and stick to itself, so that's why I say just pick it up a tiny tiny bit. Once it starts to separate, you can lift the whole mould off the sheet of paper.






Now the paper should be adhered to the shop cloth. If you pick up the shop cloth and the paper starts rolling off, stop immediately and just let it dry flat.











In this case, though, the paper stuck nicely to the shop cloth, so I clothespinned it to my laundry rack. The other sheets I will make will hang to dry as well.

The sheets tend to dry in the shape of a potato chip, with the center bulging down. I use a steam iron and iron them flat after they dry, and then pull them off the shop cloth. (You can iron directly on the paper, or you can flip the shop cloth over and iron the paper through the shop cloth.) The shop cloths can be laundered and used again.

I learned how to do papermaking while I lived in California. My teacher was a woman who lived in Beverly Hills and scrounged in the trash of all her wealthy neighbors to find things to recycle into art. (She taught a lot of other interesting art classes, too.) But paper intrigued me the most. When I heard that each person in the US throws out about a pound of paper a day, I was motivated to try and recycle my pound of paper as much as possible.


Here's a picture of my workshop in the basement. I'm not a big fan of dusting or cleaning, so my area is not the cleanest. But you can see the basic elements needed for papermaking: a water source, an electricity source, a blender, a Rubbermaid dishwashing pan (or some other deep pan), a towel, shop towels (don't use paper towels!), a paper mould, and a sponge. One thing that is not visible in this photo is one of those folding clothes-drying racks. I use mine for hanging up the paper to dry. But you'll see that in the next post.



I make all my paper from junk mail and other paper in my trash. This particular sheet was made with credit card statements, checking account statements, credit card applications, and other sensitive papers that come in the mail that I don't want to throw out. The finished product shows the flecks of ink from the original printing, and colors from whatever the original printing had. If your bank statements have a red logo, you'll see flecks of red in the handmade paper, for instance. This sheet looks very gray because it's still wet; it will dry to be a lighter gray.




I took a random sampling of paper from my stack of finished sheets to display in this photo. You can see that sometimes I have stacks of colored paper, and I mix colors together. Sometimes I blend one color more than the other, so that there are chunks of one color on a background of another color. That purple and blue sheet in the front on the right, for instance. I used both purple and blue flyers from events that had expired and had flyers stacked near the bulletin board of a bookstore. I blended the purple sheets very fine, and the blue sheets not so fine, so that the colors would stay separate in the final product.



One corner of that same photo, shown at full size. You can see bits of words from the original printing! I love that part of it.










Another random sampling, this time of some greeting cards I have made and not yet used. It's easiest to make the cards in the center, because it's just one paste-up. But I do like making the fancier designs as well. I use commercial card stock for the card and envelope; I've experimented with making the whole card and envelope, but it's not sturdy enough to travel safely through postal machines. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, so I'd rather use commercial card stock and just decorate it with handmade paper.

OK, next post will have the actual technique itself. But I'm out of time now, so that will be tomorrow.