Low Tech Paper Making Fun

One of the stumbling blocks for those of you wanting to recycle your paper trash is the inconvenience or the expense of getting a mould & deckle. You either have to buy a kit which would set you back by at least US$20 or make your own kit with 2 identical sized wooden frames from an art shop or framers, then staple gunning the mesh to one of them to make your mould.

Well, while I was still waiting for my box of leftover-in-Singapore stuff together with
my Green Bananas Paper Maker that my wonderful sis is shipping to me, I thought I'd try out a simple contraption.

Having read about it on a leaflet at the local library, I figured I'd give it a try seeing that most of what I needed was either in the house or can be got at the neighbourhood hardware store. The leaflet teaches you how to make basic paper without using the traditional mould & deckle. All it takes is some stiff metal wire, as the support and finer plastic mesh (the same ones for screen doors) as a sieve.

You tightly wrap the plastic mesh around the metal wire and then duct tape (fantastically waterproof stuff) the edges to hold both in place.

And bob's your uncle, you're all set!

For my first batch of paper, I harvested from the carpet of cherry blossoms in the garden to add as inclusions into my paper. And I used magazine pages to be blended for the paper pulp.

Blended a handful of shredded paper and added it to the vat. After 2 blender-full of pulp, I sprinkled in the previously dried cherry blossoms, and gave the mixture a good stir. Now was the moment of truth.

Would it work or wouldn't it?

Pulling the first sheet was tenuous. There was no deckle to hold the pulp mixture on the mould while the water drained. Liquid was flowing all over the place. The first sheet was uneven but complete. Phew! Pulling subsequent sheets got easier as I began to get a feel of the Meckle (a name I affectionately call this hybrid of Deckle & Mould).

Couching the paper was a cinch. And the meckle lifted without a problem and, without any serious tearing of the wet paper. Hurrah!!!

When I completed my post of papers, it was out to the balcony for something heavy to squeeze the water from the wet paper. And since I didn't feel like standing on the post throughout the night (yes, I'd put on weight since coming to Canada), the paving stone would have to do. And it worked quite well too. Nothing like using things around the house to complete a project.

The paper dried to a an off-white with brown inclusions. Not the most Scarlett O'Hara of papers but it had a salt-of-the-earth rocky quality about it.

I've made envelopes with it and together with yesterday's batch of basically white paper with Lover's Rose Elixir Tea paper I made yesterday, I've put together a neato notepaper & envelope wallet set. It goes on Etsy tomorrow. Yippee for low tech!!!

Spaceship Earth

The first time I heard the term Spaceship Earth, it made an engaging and compelling picture in my mind. All the colours of humanity hurtling through black space, inextricably linked together like the crew on board The Starship Enterprise, with one life-support system, one deflector shield and one warp engine. Unfortunately, this Spaceship Earth, has to do without a captain, like Jean Luc Picard, or Kirk even, in his less heady macho moments, as our moral center.

And so we scramble, each person, each group doing as we please. Fighting amongst ourselves to be right and powerful rather then to be good and decent. To accumulate more than our other crew mates while depleting the spaceship its limited resources.

As we are finding out, our Spaceship Earth is is having some problems with its environmental control and it is running out of fuel for its propulsion. How do we warp 9 into the the future now? It's a good thing that, like on Star Trek, that technology & brains are on hand to provide us with tools and ideas to help us out of our more-than-one-hour-per-episode predicaments.

This current episode's dilemma is Climate Change and the rapidly depleting stock of carbon fuels which, while give us all the comforts of life, also heat up the planet.

And as fate would have it, a bright spark on the crew manifest of Spaceship Earth, called Buckminister Fuller, had come up a simple concept that would not only increase our fuel supply, by cutting down the waste of it's distribution but also give us the time to find ways to replace the atmopshpere-heating carbon fuels with cleaner & cooler fuels.

He had different way of looking at the landmasses of the planet. One that link all of them (except Antartica) together. He called this the Dymaxion map. And if we were all linked by land, the so too could our energy grids. Forming a single World Energy Grid.

But the concept was so radical that the Captain Prime ministers, Presidents and CEOs of Spaceship Earth could not take it seriously. After all, for so many years, the Captain Comdrades of the USSR department were fighting the Captain Presidents of the USA department. How could they coorporate to save their Spaceship Earth, as Bucky's (as he was affectionately known) plan required?
But today, after the communist department has disbanded, we must ask ourselves, how can we not coorporate?

There is an ongoing project called GENI (Global Energy Network Institute) which has taken it upon itself to see that Bucky's plan is made known to all the departments on Spaceship Earth and working toward making the plan work.

This is what it says on it's website:

Two decades
ago, the late R. Buckminster Fuller
proposed interconnecting regional power
systems into a single continuous global electrical
energy grid • While this vision is still years away, tech-
nological advances have made the linking of international and
inter regional energy networks practicable today • Transmission
lines allow utilities to level the peaks and valleys of demand. This is
accomplished between East-West time zones, as well as North-South
seasonal variations in demand • The origin of the energy grid initiative
emerged as the highest priority of the World Game™. Its stated purpose
is “to make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible
time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or the
disadvantage of anyone.” Research reveals that these major benefits will
result from expanding electrical networks • Increase in everyone’s stan-
dard of living • Reduction of fossil fuel demand and the resultant pollu-
tion • Relief of the population explosion • Reduction of world hunger
• Enhancement of world trade • Promotion of international
cooperation and peace • The purpose of GENI, Global
Energy Network Institute, is to educate all people,
especially world leaders, to the potential
benefits of this global
solution •

Handmade Paper

Making your own paper can be a heady and therapeutic ride. When you can actually see something that was trash transform into something useful, right before your eyes.
My own journey on the crinkly road of paper started from my youthful need to do something to save the planet. And I wanted to literally see my efforts doing something positive. That's how I stumbled upon paper-making. Back then I thought of it as recycling. We didn't have a recycling programme those many years ago in Singapore. To be able to take things out from the waste stream and ease up pressure on our landfills was a good thing for a girl growing up in Singapore. We are a tiny island about 24km by 48km, with the scarcity of space is indelibly stamped on our psyche.

I found paper to be a very accepting medium into which you could add much. Like leaves, grass and flowers. The paper you end up with has wonderful, colourful inclusions.









Or, if you were inclined to recycled papers of different colours, you'd end up with a lighter shade of the predominant colour. So long as you don't mix too many other colours with that particular one. This sheet one is made mainly from magazine pages.




This one is from yellow pages... A fun thing to do with printed paper is to leave some of the pulp not blended beyond recognition and then sprinkle some broken words or letters on the the pulp before you pull the paper out of the vat.

And this from office waste coloured with a the crushed up pigments from dried out
poster paint tubes (recycling again!).

The pulp that forms paper when it dries also lends itself to being embossed. I did this by drying the pulp on kitschy plastic tablecloths with puffy patterns on it.

Paper pulp is a playful medium that not only lets you add things to it, emboss it, colour it. It also lets you shape it. Laura from Wildethyme used oil splatter screens as deckles to drain the water from the mushed up paper. It makes funky round paper. I've never seen anyone do that before and the results are wonderful. The very roundness of the sheet frames the paper as a work of art.

There are quite a few big box suppliers of handmade paper out there but somehow, I find the sheets from individual paper makers have a different energy to them. They are more textural and perhaps these people tell the story behind what went into the paper, these sheets are more beautiful to me.

If you are looking for special handmade papers for your crafting or scrap booking projects here are some Etsy paper makers.

Wildethyme has a brilliant and informative site with artful recycled and plant fiber papers.
Disturbedpenguinpoo has value for money sheets if you need a lot.
Lazy Sunday Crafts has great coloured embossed papers.