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Making Homemade Paper
My daughter asked me the other day if I knew how to make homemade paper. She has the idea that she can recycle some of the envelopes and other mail we get into personalized stationery for gifts for her friends.
As a matter of fact, I DO still remember how to make paper from when I was a girl in Sprouts. One of our projects was learning how to make our own paper. As I recall at the time, we used newspaper as it broke up fairly easily which was important as we were mashing up the pulp by hand with a mortar and pestle. Newspaper makes a really dark grey paper, not only from the original colour of it, but especially because of all the ink.
We decided to do things the easy way to make the pulp by using a blender instead.
First we prepared the paper by tearing it up into very small pieces and letting it soak in some warm water.
While our paper was soaking, we made our paper screen out of a wooden frame in the size that she wanted the paper to be. Then we stretched the window screen tightly over the frame and stapled it on. The side that you staple on to the frame is the bottom, so that the wooden frame gives you sides for your pulp to sit in.
We also built a press out of a piece of plywood cut to fit exactly into the frame. We attached 2 smaller pieces of wood (about an inch thick and 4” long) to the the top side of the plywood at opposite ends of the long side to have something to pull the press out of the frame with and also to act as legs when we turned the press over. Then we stretched some flannel around the bottom side of the press and stapled it on the top side.
To turn the paper into pulp, we filled up the blender up with the pieces of paper and water to almost the top and blended it until it was a smooth paste. We added 1 tablespoon of cornstarch and blended it into the mixture. This helps to bind the paper and also to make it better to write on so your ink doesn’t bleed as much.
Next, we filled a basin half full of water. (The basin has to be larger than your screen frame.)
We added the pulp and stirred. We took out the big clumps of paper.
Next we dipped the screen frame into the water, with the screen side down. Then we moved the screen gently back and forth in the water to level the pulp in the frame.
We lifted up on the frame and let the excess water drain. Our basin and frame is longer than it is wide, so we just turned our screen sideways and let the sides of the basin hold the frame while it was dripping.
After the frame stopped dripping, we moved it to a towel and gently pushed the press into the frame to squeeze out any excess water.
When we had removed as much excess water as we could, we turned the screen with the press still inside upside down and gently lifted the screen off. We let the paper dry on top of the press, (you can also use a hairdryer to speed things up) and then gently peeled off the paper off the press.
Blog Category:
RRR
Blog Group:
DIY
