July 2003 Journal

7-1-03 A couple of months ago, my husband donated a pair of cotton pants to the papermaking cause. They were brown with a grayish cast, and I thought pulp from them might be usable mixed with plant fibers. I beat the rag today and I'm having serious second thoughts about it. The wet pulp looks terrible, a dirty gray/brown. No time to pull anything today.

7-2-03 Umph! Not only is the pulp ugly, it's full of unbeaten threads. When I was beating the pulp yesterday, I had fifteen other irons in the fire, and looking back now, I realize that it only beat an hour, not two. Given the wretched color of the stuff, I wasn't about to put it back in the Hollander and beat it again. I pulled a sheet to see what it looked like, and actually, it isn't all that bad.   The threads save it from being totally commonplace. Whatever. I can always use it for playing around with weird ideas without feeling like I'm wasting good pulp. I pulled a few cards and played around with some cotton netting, but the rest of the pulp is in the refrigerator. **A few days ago I was at Wal-Mart and cut through the children's aisle to get to the light bulbs. Along the way, I ran across the foam tubes that children use as floats while swimming, and the papermaker's mind kicked in. These things are slick. Paper will not stick. They would be ideal for forming paper tubes. Now...until that moment, paper tubes had never occurred to me, and I haven't the faintest idea what I wanted to do with them if I did make them. However, one of the small diameter floats came home with me. And it did work. These are only 2.75" in diameter, too small for votive covers, but they would make nice paper "wind chimes" if I can figure a way to string them up. A problem for later.

7-3-03 Today I had the delightful experience of sharing a day pulling with Dorie Hubbard, the woman who taught me to pull my first sheet from recycled paper. Her focus is actually weaving and she had never pulled plant pulps before, so this was a unique "teaching the teacher" experience for me.   We had a ball, and she went home with 40 or 50 sheets

7-5-03 The paper tube thing was still floating around in my mind this morning, so I made a special trip to Wal-Mart after the larger diameter tube. This one worked beautifully for forming votive covers. To prevent the problem of a cover shifting or blowing over too close to the candle, I formed bottoms that the glass candle container can rest on. Because this is done when the paper is wet, it's easy to make the bottom, pulling off the excess and forming a feathered deckling around the edge. When the wet paper is wrapped around the tube, it is sealed to that bottom with a touch of wheat paste and the seam is invisible. I made two, one with the darker edge of the sheet at the top and the other with the lighter area at the top. They're 4" in diameter (14" in circumference). Neither has been treated with beeswax or paraffin yet. Both of the covers were simply tests to work through the details, and I didn't take much care about decorating, but I can envision any number of things that can be done that will make better use of the light.

7-6-03 The front flowerbed has two huge early spiderwort plants, each with something like 50 stems or more. I've done this plant before, and it makes a lovely, though glutinous, pulp. One of the plants blew down this spring, but continued to bloom beautifully, so I just left it until it began crowding the mums. This afternoon I cut the stalks off at the ground (it will come back), and stripped the leaves and flower heads off, leaving the stalks to cut up and make into paper tomorrow. Initially, I planned to save and cook the leaves separately, but after taking a good look at them, I changed my mind. They're parallel veined and more than large enough to fool with, but they're much like Peruvian daffodil leaves. The leaves offer no resistance to tearing across their width and show no sign of internal fibers. I'm going to pass on doing them, making a guess that they would cook up into gunk and little else.

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7-7-03 Cooked the spiderwort stalks this morning, and they produced quite enough gunk of their own without including the leaves. Washing with a hose cleaned them well enough, but it sure reduced the amount of plant material available. I had intended to to this bunch in the beater, but after washing, there wasn't enough left to justify using it. I have to keep reminding myself that the gunk needed to go. Instead, I used the blender. The spiderwort stalks were tough to process that way, and that surprised me. I figured 30 seconds would do it, but sheets pulled from that pulp were too fibrous, so I processed it another 30 seconds and the paper improved. This is a picture of both sheets (right is underprocessed, left is better paper). Neither was very impressive. I had saved some unprocessed stems to add back to the pulp, and those improved the appearance. **Last month when I harvested red elm bast, I also stripped the bast/bark from the tiny elm limbs and dried and saved it. This afternoon I cooked that. I had done the bast by itself and the pulp was a delight to work with, making a lovely thin mahogany colored sheet. The pulp from the bast/bark pulls very similarly, though the paper is totally different. Only had time to pull a couple of test sheets, but they're as thin and smooth as the pure bast, but the bark stains the bast to more of a brown than a mahogany.

7-8-03 Pulled a little over 200 swatches of the red elm bast/bark paper. **The "soup" from cooking the bast/bark was a deep, dark mahogany, and I had saved it simply because it was so dark. When I was stripping the tree limbs, the bark stained the pair of jeans I was wearing, and I haven't been able to get the stain out. That made me think the elm soup might be a fairly permanent dye. So, just for the heck of it, I tie dyed a new white tee shirt with the stain. There was no mordant used. This is the shirt after dyeing, rinsing and washing twice. Okay, so my tying techniques could use some work, but the dye does seem to take and hold.

7-9-03 I'm leaving tomorrow to play basketmaker for a few days, so I spent the day cleaning up odds and ends pulp. Among other things, I pulled some stationery sheets from mixed pulps using elm bast for edging.

7-14-03 Before I left I spotted some immature northern catalpa beans alongside one of the city streets, but they were out of reach. When I contacted the city street department to see if they could assist me in gathering them, I was told that the cherry picker couldn't be taken out to help an individual with something like that. However...if the limbs needed trimming... This morning the cherry picker truck lopped two small limbs off the tree, then the employee spent the next few minutes pulling beans off, throwing them down and asking a million questions about papermaking. The beans are 18"-24" long and about 3/8" across. They were immature, the seeds and their coverings not fully formed. I had done matured and dried pods before, but they were tough and made a heavy, dark, fibrous paper. I was curious whether the green pods would be easier to process and whether they would make a finer paper. Cut the beans in 1"-2" lengths and cooked them for three hours in lye. The immature seeds, seed coverings and inside sheath of the pods cooked to mush leaving only the outside pod fibers. This went into the beater for two hours and made a pulp that is a mixture of very fine fibers that bond around heavier fibers forming a lovely sheet. It pulled easily and drained well. Paper from the immature pods is smooth and surprisingly light in color. Backlighting shows the heavier fibers.

7-16-03 We have a couple of mini-mall flea markets in town. I really, really hate going to them because I always see something that I can use sometime or another, and I can't resist buying. Then I have to wag it home and find a place to store it until that "sometime" comes around. This may be next week, or it may be next year, or it may be some nebulous time in the future, which may very well be after I die. So you see why I hate shopping there, but these flea markets are my source of rag for the beater, and I was out of white cotton pulp and the rag to make it from, so I went. I was good. I was very good. I passed up shelves (which I could really have used in my storage closet), I passed up an extensive rack of books without even turning my head (well, almost without); I walked past the tool section (though I'll admit to giving it a good look on the way by); and only came home with two pair of size 28 white cotton jeans. (Sure wish I'd bought those shelves, though.) One pair, after cutting, weighed 13 oz. I added part of an old tee shirt, and made up the remainder of the pound and a quarter with abaca. I prefer some abaca with cotton rag to give it a bit more body. For the record, I this time I DID remember to rinse the cloth twice before pitching it in the beater, so no trouble with suds. However, about an hour into beating, I was in the kitchen when I heard a change in the tone of the beater....no thump-bump, just a steady hum. When I got out there, there was no circulation, but there was no pulp jam, either. Huh? The pulley was turning, but the drum wasn't. Took the shield off, held the pulley steady and turned the drum, which spun easily and freely. The set screw that secured the large pulley to the drum shaft had backed out enough to free the shaft. Dug out the hex wrenches, but it took me three trips around the shaft before I found the flat spot where the set screw seats. Tightened the set screw and tested it, no problems. It wasn't until after I put the safety cover back on that it dawned on me I should have marked the flat spot on the outside of the shaft. Duh.

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7-17-03 Ran into Jane at the Honeysuckle Vine this morning, and she said she had more yucca, so I stopped by her house and loaded it up. This time there was enough root material to run through the beater. Peeled, cut and cooked the roots for three hours in lye, then beat for three hours in the Hollander. These roots were like the others -- expandable and very elastic -- and it was strange watching go 'round and 'round. They would flatten and expand as they passed under the drum, then on the trip back around the tub, shrink back into themselves and become a tight knot again.. The expansion/contraction stopped as they began to disintegrate, still it was funny. (Doesn't take much to amuse me.) The yucca root paper is cream colored, featureless and extremely smooth and slick. It pulls thin easily and is slightly softer than most papers when pulled thick.

7-22-03 I wanted some swatches from cattail heads, but I was afraid it might be too early to gather those. I had saved some heads from last fall and dug those out. (Before storing, they had been treated to a round in a 200 degree oven to kill off the worms, and were in good shape.)
Stripped the fluff, cooked it for 1 hour in soda ash, processed it in the blender, and pulled 112 swatches. Cattail head paper is interesting because of its texture and weight. Even very thin sheets are heavy (by weight) and the texture is almost that of pigskin. **In addition to doing paper stuff, I'm a baskemaker. I'm also a compulsive keeper. I was rummaging around my basket closet for something when I ran across a couple of coils of hickory bark. Hickory bark? Bark? Ack! This stuff is BAST, not bark! And bast is a prized papermaking material. Of course, I'd never done hickory and had no idea whether it would work or not. On top of that, hickory is known for being tough, both bark and tree, but that didn't stop me.   I cut one of the coils up and cooked it in lye for 3.5 hours. A major thunderstorm came along just as I turned the pot off, so it sat for another hour or hour and a half before I could rinse the material. The cooking "soup" is a deep chocolate brown that stains everything it comes in contact with and takes forever to wash out of the cooked bast. It took even longer yesterday evening, because a young skunk came ambling up and I had to wait for him to check things out (from the safety of the porch) before I could finish. ('Possums, skunks and groundhogs in the backyard are among the joys of small town living.) By then, it was too late to process the washed material.

7-23-03   Since I wasn't certain hickory would process, I only cooked enough to try, not enough for the beater. However, it processes perfectly in a blender and makes excellent paper. The bast processes into a slick, smooth pulp that pulls lovely, featureless sheets, which have a toughness equal to or greater than mulberry or hemp. Even the tissue thin sheets are hard to tear. The picture hardly does the paper justice, and does nothing to show the lovely, fine, shiny fibers of the sheet. I haven't bleached the pulp yet, and may not get a chance to till next week, but even with the color as is, I can see many, many uses because of its toughness. And another plus factor for the material is that it does not require sizing. This is one of those plant fibers that behave beautifully from beginning of processing to end result, a real pleasure to work with. I am impressed.

7-24-03 On the papermaking list we've been discussing the dyes from plant "soups" (leftover cooking water). Just out of curiosity, I've started a "dye shirt" to use for each of the plant material soups. I pour or dab a bit of the dye onto the shirt, let it begin to dry, then finish ironing it dry and indelibly label the spot with dye source and date. I realize this isn't the proper way to dye cloth, but it will give me a general idea of the color. At some point, I will begin washing the shirt to see how much each stain fades, but for now, I'll continue to add spots to it. And of course, sometime down the road I'll actually put the shirt on and wear it, probably to some artsy function.

7-28-03 Ugh! My paper pulling station stinks! Something (hopefully just a very small animal type gift from one of my cats) has died under the deck. Add to that odor a well skunk sprayed cat, who is sulking on the porch, and I find it impossible to work outside. I cleaned house instead.

7-29-03 In the process of cleaning house, I found a stash of Bradford pear bark, and of course, it went into the pot. It was pretty much a lost cause as far as pure pear bark paper. The cooked fiber broke down easily enough, but the individual fibers won't fray or hydrate. Additional cooking and beating only shortens the fibers.   The cooking soup does make a permanent dye, that I've used on basket material before. I tried the cooking water from this batch to dye some cotton rag with marginal results. (The sheet on the left is undyed white cotton rag; the sheet on the right was treated with the Bradford pear bast soup.) **Pulled an 8.5"x11" sheet of Joe-Pye and cast it onto a ceramic dragonfly tile. I sprayed the underneath side of the sheet with walnut juice stain before placing it on the tile. When paper sprayed in this manner dries, a portion of the stain migrates to the highest point, which is the dragonfly, creating a darker image. Contrast that picture with this one done in hickory with no stain sprayed underneath. **I was in Bowling Green last weekend at Western University, and while I was there, I gathered some insect eaten basswood leaves. For all intent and purposes, these leaves were so well chewed, they amount to skeleton leaves. While I had the hickory pulp in the vat, I pulled several cards using a lead on the front. Because the hickory pulp is so fine, every vein of the leaf imprinted beautifully on the backside of the sheet. I may have to follow up with this using the leaf only for an imprint, not an inclusion. **The hickory bast that I used on the 24th came from a chairmaker here in Berea who uses it for caning his work. Last week before I went out of town, I stopped by his shop and talked with him about how he harvested and processed the hickory into strips. He said the bark comes rom trees that are cut by loggers in the spring. He takes a crew to strip the bast from the green logs before they are cut into lumber. The crew brings the wide strips of bark back to the shop where they are run through a machine that cuts the wide strips into 3/4" ones. At this point, these strips are quite thick and covered with bark that must be removed. He has another machine that essentially cuts these strips into four parts along the thickness. The first strip is comprised of the bark which is discarded; the second strip he calls "thirds," which contains both bast fiber and a rusty brown corky material (these strips are also discarded); then come "seconds" (all fiber, no cork); and the last is "firsts" or the finest next-to-the-trunk bast. He uses both the seconds and firsts for weaving seats in his chairs. The bast that I used for paper was either firsts or seconds, don't know which. I didn't know enough about the hickory at the time to recognize which it was. While I was at the shop, he gave me some strips of thirds to try as paper. I cooked and processed it yesterday and I'm not happy with it at all because of the crumbly, corky material. This stuff does NOT belong in paper, but I haven't the faintest idea how to remove it from either the raw material or the cooked bast. It pops out of the raw material fairly easily, but is scattered throughout the strips and would be too labor intensive to remove before cooking. Cooking softens the cork and turns it black, but then the stuff is lost in the mass resulting from cooking and rinsing with the hose. Simply processing it along with the bast results in fine black chunks scattered throughout the paper. Pressure doesn't do much to flatten them, so there is a certain amount of texture to the sheet. The paper is still as tough as that made from better bast, but the appearance and texture are a poor second. :( Here are the two sheets contrasted -- left is hickory paper made from the better bast, the right made from the "thirds" bast. You can see the specks of black corky material.

7-30-03 Okay, the Artisan Center ribbon cutting is over, and now I can share what I was doing out there at the construction site all last summer. In April of last year, the state commission me to create a book for the Governor of Kentucky in appreciation for his efforts in gaining the $8.7 million to build the facility. The book was to be made from the plants that were growing on the construction site. If you read the journal entries for last summer, you know I spent the better part of the season out there harvesting plants in front of the bulldozers in order to make the book. It was presented to the Governor at the ceremony yesterday. Here are pictures of the outside, the Artisan Center logo page and a sample paper page (the paper samples are broomsedge, natural and bleached). The area where I live is strongly craft oriented toward wood, metal and pottery, so most award pieces are from these fields. I count it as an achievement for all papermakers that the presentation for the Governor should be chosen from the field of handmade paper.

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