Recycling Waste Paper and Nature’s Dry Fibers

• Don’t use hard, tough fibers such as bark or wood chips unless you have time to first hammer, pound, and boil them into a soft pulp.
• For textured papers, blend reedy grasses into a slurry of paper towel, add pencil shavings or mashed egg carton into the blender, or press milkweed silk into a wet leaf made from brown paper bag or paper towel.  Try laminating yarn scraps, ferns, or pressed lilac blossoms into a wet leaf.  Emboss your paper by pressing a bent wire design into a wet leaf.  Scraps of colored tissue or construction paper will add color to the slurry.
• If the slurry gets scrumpled on the screen, wash it off and dip again.  Don’t rearrange the slurry or wet leaf with your fingers because it will disturb the evenness of the sheet.
• Each sheet of paper gets progressively thinner as you dip.  From time to time you will need to add more slurry to the bath.
• Don’t pour slurry down the sink drain, unless you sieve it first.  It is best to flush it down the toilet or pour it outside on the ground.
• Sizing is optional, but it makes paper less absorbent and easier to write on.  Heat 1 1/2 ounces of bone glue, hide glue, or gelatin and 1 pint of water until glue or gelatin is dissolved and smooth.  Pour glue mixture into a pan or tub big enough to fit your paper.  Add another pint of cold water to the mixture, and slide each sheet of dry handmade paper in and out of the sizing bath.  Blot the paper with newspaper, and press it dry with an iron.
• Newspaper blotters sometimes leave print on your fresh paper sheets.  If it is a problem, use paper towel blotters.  Or if you are making many sheets or setting up a children’s  paper factory – as we did at the Boston Children’s Museum, where sometimes 300 kids each made a sheet of paper per day – invest in several yards of white felt cut to the size of your frames, and use the felt pieces as blotters, squeezing them out between uses.
• A kids’ paper-making factory is a great idea for Christmas or summer fairs.  At the end of the paper-making table, set up a table with potato prints, letter stamps, Styrofoam shapes, and ink pads for printing greeting cards.  Or set up a bookmaking table, and use textured handmade paper as endpapers in your hand-bound books.
• Reading and writing become much more exciting when you create your own books, telling and illustrating your own stories.

Paper is one of the most important and useful materials humans have ever created.  Until a hundred years ago, paper was made by hand and was mostly used for precious documents.

Wasps taught us how to make paper.  (Have you studied a hive?)  Wasps chew fibers and weeds into a kind of paste or mash, then spit it out to form the walls and chambers of their hive; when it dries, it is a kind of paper sculpture.

The first people to make paper were the Chinese, in 105 A.D.  In the sixth century, when the Chinese lost to the Arabs at the Battle of Samarkand, captured paper makers ere forced to share their craft with their new masters.  A thousand years later, the art of paper making reached Europe.

Related Sample Articles from the book The Best of Making Things – A Hand Book of Creative Discovery:

• Paper from Vegetable Fibers