Recipes for Paper-making:

Below is a collection of papers I made during a workshop with Marieke De Hoop at her studio, the PapierLab in Rotterdam (NL). Below are some notes I took in her class:

Cellulose = plant fiber

Lignina = tissue of

plant

You can make paper out of lots of fiberous bio-materials. Plantwise, we can look at fruit peels, grass, onions, leaves, bark, flowers, seaweed and so on. There is a lot we can experiment with. Recycled materials such as fabrics can also be milled and turned into paper, however sometimes “virgin” material, being new cotton for example, is necessary to bind the fibers. In the yellow paper above I used milled yellow cotton with green grass and for the red text, I used a onion. Below I mixed a bottom layer of white + pink cotton with traces of tree seeds. The second more visible layer is created from a mix of white cotton and fresia.

For the piece below, I mixed the onion fiber (dark red) with fresia fibers. The “RUB ME” text is created from white cotton.

Reused sleeping blanket, milled with sprinkles of blackberry leaves . The text is “Far”.

White cotton with blackberry leaves and tree seeds.

Treatment of Fibers:
Soda (alkaline) and cooking

I initially picked blackberry leaves, tree seed and willow leaves as these were the more accesible things to steal in my neighbourhood. For the leaves I cut them down into strips of 1.5cm (width) x 3cm (length). I boiled each in about 2 litres of water and added about 20 grams of cleaning soda. [Measurements = 10grams of soda per liter of water]. It took about 2-3 hours to boil down the willow leaves, and about 1.5 hours for the balckberry leaves and seeds. The aim is to soften the fibres and dissolve the lignina layers of the cellulose so when the fibers make contact they can stick. The seeds didn’t work at all... but I thought they would still be nice to keep.

I washed them well, until the soda was almost gone. The colour continues to bleed through the water so that’s an indicator for how much soda could be left. Lots of bleeding = there’s still soda.

Afterwards, I blended the leaves with a few cups of water, not until mush but until the parts were tiny. Below you’ll see three containers: 1) the blue one is milled blue cotton, 2) the yellow is milled cotton and 3) is the blended blackberry leaves. I needed to blend the balckberry leaves with a little of the cotton because the fibers weren’t strong enough to stick.

Pressing the Paper

Some Equippment:

1) Paper pressing screen

2) A4 cloth pieces

3) sponge

4) square bucket for water

During the workshops, I learned one way of paper-making. In this method we had lots of different containers with coloured cottons (milled and then blended), onion fibers, fresia fibers etc. all mixed with a little less than a litre of water. We had small cups and scoopers. The square box is filled with clean water and is big enough for you to scoop the screen in and out.

[Make sure the sponge and the A4 cloth laid over it is prepared before each paper press]

1) Scoop whatever combination of materials (in the same cup or at different pours while keeping to the measurement of the cup and size of the screen).

2) Pour on to screen area and try to distribute the fiber materials in the water evenly across the screen. Sometimes I would move it towards the surface, draining a bit of the water to see the levels. If there was a part that was too thick I would just dip it back in the water and mix it around again.

3) When you’re ready, scoop the screen up, let the water drain and then remove the top frame. Flip the screen part that is hold the paper toward the a4 cloth (the sponge should be underneath). Press the screen from left to right or right to left (whichever motion you feel most comfortable with).

4) You can continue layering the cloth over the paper and continue pressing on top of each.

5) You can let the paper out to dry when you’re done. It can take a few days to completely dry. You can also use a hot press if that’s accesible to you.

Credit:
Images: Scans of the paper created in the paper workshop
Images: Phone photos of the paper0making workshop