Practice dragon

I just finished a small course over at the local Tandy to see how one of the other local leatherworkers is doing her staining.  Staining's something I feel I could still improve on and I did figure out a pretty good deal from taking the course.  There's umpteen dozen ways stain can be applied and the way I'd gotten in the habit of doing it is rather different than what she's in the habit of doing.  The dragon I made as part of the course turned out a might sloppy (all three of the classes wound up being a bit rushed) but I feel it's met the mission objective of adding some solid stain blending to my toolbox.

Heron Pouch

During a recent visit, my Mother decided she'd like one of my pouches.  Having the benefit of being able to look at my materials she decided she wanted black oiled leather for the body of the pouch and green suede for the walls.  She wasn't entirely sure what kind of decoration she wanted though, so she left that to me.  I'm pretty glad she did because it gave me a great opportunity to try something out that I've been pondering for a while.  Some designs are precise or symmetrical enough that going through the process of carving the design into the leather would be very time consuming and the results can be uncertain.  For designs that don't have much inherent depth I'd wondered if I mightn't be able to to just do an ink transfer and leave it at that.  So that's what I did here, an ink transfer covered in a couple coats of super sheen and stitched to the front of the pouch.  I like to think the stitching makes it something of a window/frame but either way it was a pretty dandy way to slap a heron on some veg-tan.

Papermaking Round 14

At least I think this is round 14...  In either case, I'd started using corn starch as a size and that's working pretty well.  I've also replaced the sponge with a rolling pin to squeeze the water from the pulp.  It's a bit messier and there's a certain knack I'm still working on, but it's vastly faster and produces a better, more burnished sheet in the end.  Round 15 was made with just printer paper pulp but I'm still waiting for the sheets to dry so I'm not sure how that's come out yet.

Papermaking Round 12

The weeks since we came back from Grand Forks have been too busy for me to find any time for making paper but fortunately that started to let up just a tad a couple days ago.  I've been starting to experiment with the chemistry of the paper which, at the moment, mostly means trying different size agents to see how they affect the result.  Size is the term for anything added to the pulp to make the paper more consistent, flexible, flat, etc.  In Batch 12 I used a water based contact cement and had what I would term as "moderate success."  The paper is slightly better than Batch 11 but not by an overly significant degree.  As soon as I hit the baking aisle at the grocery store and free up a few more hours, we'll see how Batch 13 turns out.

Papermaking Round 10

Round 10 was an attempt to make a massive amount of paper at one time.  I used 3x the normal amount of pulp and probably could have made roughly 25 pages with a gallon bucket full of pulp.  Unfortunately I've found a fault in my mesh that is causing a weak spot in each sheet.  I'm guessing the mesh has gotten clogged with ink and other such byproducts and this is preventing the water from draining through the mesh in that spot.  I'm going to try using some scraps of cloth to replace the mesh and see if that works any better.  It might get clogged as well but cloth is easier to replace than a plastic mesh I bought as part of a kit.

It took a couple hours to mold about 20 pages and only about half of them were decent enough to dry out (the others have been returned to the pulp bucket).  Of the ~10 "survivors" three are still pretty soggy that don't show any sign of drying over the past 2 days.  I'm still experimenting with different approaches towards the drying situation.  It seems like the paper needs to be left unrestrained to dry but it needs pressure to prevent warping and the two are not compatible.

In the meantime, I have a paper that feels nice, folds cleanly, and even looks pretty nice.  All the bits of ink and additives in the source paper seem to clump together (magnetism maybe?) and you get these wee specks of color that stick out against the nice, neutral gray of the paper.  Mixing newsprint and printer paper pulp works so well I'm having second thoughts about trying to use hydrogen peroxide to adjust the color.

Papermaking Round 9

Now I'm getting somewhere.  I went back to using the dispersion method with the deckle.  The pour method is easier, cleaner, and uses 1/4 of the water, but I can reduce the water requirements (which was all of a gallon for this batch) by making a lot of paper in each batch.  I was surprised with how many sheets I got out of the same amount of pulp and, as one might figure, the sheets are smoother and more consistent now.  They're also more flexible so they can fold without cracking now.

Now that I have a process I can work with I'll be working on refining how the sheet's dry and mass production.  I'd also like to experiment with using various additives like food coloring, hydrogen peroxide, and gelatin to see how they affect the end result.  Get a little more chemistry going in my vat.

Batch #10 is pulped and waiting until I have time to mold it into sheets.  I would guess that it's at least 20 sheets of paper worth of pulp (currently sitting in a gallon bucket as a 50/50 mix of pulp and water) so that'll be pretty representative of where I'd like to be with the final process.

Papermaking Round 7 & Round 8

It seems when paper's made on an industrial scale they use hydraulic presses to compress the pulp sheets, both to remove much of the water and to burnish the sheets.  I figured I could probably jury rig a home version using vises and a couple cookie sheets and setting it on one corner.  In hind sight I'm more surprised that it worked at all, but there was a trickle of water that came out over an hour's time or so.  The resulting paper was flatter on one side, if it happened to be flush against the metal (the felt doesn't burnish in the least) but otherwise the final result was no different than any other sample.  I -might- be able to get enough pressure if I build a full out rig for this specific purpose, but I'm not convinced that it would be worth it yet.  Even using my current methods, 80-90% of the water is being reclaimed before it gets to that stage.  I'll try another approach.

Round 8 was retrying a somewhat modified approach to the same technique but didn't fair much better.  I did use a mix of roughly 50/50 printer paper and junk mail and I like how that's come out so I think I'll keep doing that.

Papermaking Round 6

This was a quick round last night, but informative none the less.  I wanted to test if I could use a piece of acrylic to press the paper flat but wound up learning a fair bit more than that.  I cut a peice of acrylic to fit within the deckle and quickly learned that the answer to that first question is "Not really."  With enough pressure the acrylic (or any other flat surface) will depress the pulp, but not enough to give it an even texture and consistency.  This will, however, push most of the air out between the acrylic and the oh so wet pulp creating a pressure differential that tears the proto paper to itty bitty bits if you try pulling the acrylic away.  So the press mold notion was pretty much a bust all the way around.  A fiberous material like leather or wood might be able to work around the pressure differential, or at least lessen the initial pressure difference, but it's kind of pointless if the pulp resists flattening in the first place.

So that was the "Failure" of this round (always an option) but I did figure out a few things.  For one, I made this batch using roughly 1/8th the amount of water I usually would by "massaging" the pulp over the mesh rather than trying to float it.  I like this using of a few cups of water rather than a couple gallons so I'll probably try to continue it.  I also found that just leaving the paper out in the open to dry overnight, no covers or books or any such seems like a perfectly valid way to let them dry.  There's some warping but not as much as I would expect.  It may be relevant that it dried without being left out in sunlight, though I'm not sure.

Feels like it's time to do some further research.

Paper Making Round 5

This is one of those cases where a little modern technology makes a dramatic difference.  One cheap blender later the paper's coming out much more uniform.  It's coming along much faster now too, so fast that I tried two types of pulp this week.  The lower batch of pages was made with printer paper and the upper batch was made with junkmail.  I'm probably more amused than I should be that the junkmail is essentially cardboard.  I'm imagining it'll be handy as book binding and structural stuff and I'm fairly happy with it as is.  The recycled printer paper could stand to be a bit more even, and even a bit thinner.  I tore a chunk off one sheet just to see how the grain's aligned and it's less random than I'd suspected.  This leads me to conclude that the fibers tend to naturally line up along a grain, probably due to some feature of their structure.  Of course, I don't have any way to test that hypothesis objectively (yet), but it's an intriguing notion.  At this rate I expect to be hitting upon a product-worthy process in 2 or 3 more rounds.

Manual Paper Making Round 4

This week I played with going back to printer paper and using saline rather than water.  This was another improvement, but I figure that's more from using printer paper than adding salt to the water.  Near as I could tell, the saline didn't really make any difference.  I gave the pulp two rounds through the mortar and pestle and doubled it up in the mold and that's helped improve the quality of the result, but still not quite where I want to be.  If it sounds like I'm piling too many variables into one experiment, I probably am but it's all made necessary by the time constraints.

This latest round has persuaded me that recycling paper sans blender is certainly possible, but it isn't exactly practical.  Since I'd like to churn out useable paper on a fairly regular basis, and I can't spend a week making 2-4 sheets at a time, I've sprung for the simplest blender I could find.  For Round 5 I expect to have something closer to what we'd normally consider note-worthy paper.

Manual Paper Making Round 3

These seem to be falling into a weekly cycle, entirely by accident.  As it happens, tearing up the paper, mashing it, and forming it into sheets each take about a half hour to an hour.  This block of time just about matchs what I have available while I'm waiting for something (usually glue or stain) to cure so that's generally when I get to work on this.

This last week I took the other half of that junkmail, shredded it and let it soak for a couple days before I did any masticating.  It occurred to me that the classic tool to use for mastication would be a mortar and pestle.  I picked one up easily enough and I played around with using it on the paper this round.  I'm not sure if the results are very clear, but the paper is certainly a better quality.  I'm still waiting for it to dry but so far it seems a good deal more consistent. 

I think this week I'll switch back to using printer paper scraps.  I'm also curious to see if saline might have an effect that water alone doesn't.  Sounds like a pretty good experiment to me.

Manual papermaking Round TWO!

After the first experiment I revised my process a bit and figured I'd try it out with a somewhat less processed variety of paper.  I used a material we all have a veritably endless supply of: junkmail. This time around I'd picked up a one gallon bucket just so I'd have a receptacle for water other than the vat, and it makes measuring out 1 gallon of water (which is a controlled variable for these experiments) pretty simple.

I shredded half the flyer by tearing it into 1 cm strips and then tearing those (usually 4-5 at a time) into 1-2 cm chunks.  This resulted in, essentially, a vat full of confetti.  Once I added the water I wadded it all into a big ball again and used my fingers to break it all down.  There were still a few larger chunks left shifting around but on the whole it worked relatively well.  That was about all I had time for though and after dumping everything into the bucket it spent 5 days sitting in a corner (covered, fortunately).  The next time I had a chance to work on it it looked like this:

That cloudy, grey mass in the bottom of the bucket is all the saturated paper fibers all settled in the solution.  The water is noticeably darker at this point, presumably from the ink that's been loosened from the fibers and is floating freely.

I managed to use every last bit of pulp this time and wound up with 4 sheets of paper.  The last sheet was made by pouring the pulp from the vat, through the mold, and into the bucket (pretty messy but easy to prepare for).  This last sheet wound up being the thickest of the four and probably the closest to what I'd eventually like to achieve.  The third sheet I put on an embossed sheet of felt to see if it'd form to design.  Surprisingly enough, it did, though not well enough that it'll come out in the photos.

I let them airdry this time around, at least for a few hours.  After that two of them had dried just about completely (though they were a little warped) and I put those two under a couple books.  Of the other two I left one out in the open and one under a book.

The following morning I found that the one left on it's own had dried completely but warped in the process.  The two that were dry before going into traction were a bit crinkly.  The one that was still a bit wet when it went in traction was mostly dry and perfectly flat.  So assuming it stays flat going forward I think I have a technique for that.

Relative to that first patch, these were a definite improvement but there's still a ways to go before I've got a good, proper sheet of paper.  I think these were probably too heavy on the ink and that's caused some discoloration in the end result.  Not a lot, but just a little.  There's also all those unbroken chunks of scrap paper.  Not as many as the first batch, but still a fair few.  I'm pondering some sort of "mechanical mastication", something like a hand-cranked egg beater or interlocking gears.  It's occurred to me that the blender is indeed exactly that, but I'd still like to avoid blades and electrons if I can.

First attempt at recycling paper sans blender

Whether it's printing drafts, scribbing notes, mocking patterns, whipping up prototypes, or just sketching notions I tend to use a fair amount of paper in the course of my work.  Whatever I don't wind up keeping for future reference winds up the recycle bin, but then I can't really say what happens to it after that.  I try to give preference to recycled paper when I can but it doesn't seem to have become a standard (yet!).  From that I got the first notions of recycling at least some of my own paper but being me I couldn't just follow the simple steps available on the internet and leave it at that.  I had to experiment to see what would happen and tease out the underlying fundamentals.  It's a thing I do.

Anyone who googles "recycle paper" will find all sorts of youtubes and how tos on how to turn old scraps into reusable paper.  The basic process is pretty much the same everywhere you go though:
- Tear paper into scraps
- Use a blender to turn scraps (and a fair amount of water) into pulp
- Pour pulp into a mold (generally in a vat full of water, this keeps the pulp relatively even)
- Remove pulp from mold and let it dry

There are some variations in approach to the molding and drying processes but those are the nuts and bolts and it makes a certain sense.  Paper is made up of wood fibers that have been ground up and stuck back together.  Saturating the fibers and masticating/blending them breaks those bonds and you wind up with lots of little wood fibers floating around in the water (along with ink, graphite, and probably a bit of bleach and other chemicals used to turn paper white).  These fibers are the end all, be all of paper and, to my mind, the longer the fiber, the stronger (and arguably better quality) the paper.  This is my hypothesis at least, though a comparison of japanese (very long fibers) and european (very short papers) paper seems to suggest such.

So if I were attempting to maintain as much of the fibers as possible then putting the pulp through a blender seemed somewhat counterproductive.  At the same time, I try to avoid using a power tool (like a blender) if it doesn't offer a clear advantage over trying to do the same task manually.  In this case, there's the apparent fact that a blender can reduce a few sheets worth of paper to pulp in 10 seconds or less... but I wasn't really sure that the blender offers any other benefits.

So my plan was to follow this process but instead of using a blender I would attempt to masticate (to clarify, I mean 'to tear/grind' rather than 'to chew') the paper by hand.  Tearing the paper into scraps took a surprising amount of time and for this first attempt I was just using old printer paper scraps.  Since this paper is so heavily treated and the fibers so short to begin with it's a bit of a worst case scenario, but it gives me a place to start.  The scraps of about 4 sheets worth of paper went into a vat with about 1.25 gallons of water.  I attempted to break them up further at first by just stirring the vat (which didn't work at all really).  Then I clumped whatever I could handle into a giant wad of soggy paper and ground that up between my fingers.  This worked surprisingly well but still left some fairly large scraps and wasn't something I could try multiple times.

After that the vat, with it's watery mixture of saturated free fibers and clumps of paper scraps, sat untended for 2-3 days just because I didn't have time to do anything else with it.  Once I had an hour to spare I was able to strain enough pulp out of the vat for three sheets of paper.  After giving them a day to dry they're somewhat crude as paper goes, all bendy and lumpish and uneven, but a pretty valid first attempt.  The larger scraps are still in there and several of them still have the ink or graphite they had when they went in so there's some spots as well.  It's paper though, and a very informative first attempt.




Next I'm going to try roughly the same process (I've some notions on how to refine some of the details) with newspaper and see how that works out.  The fibers seem to be longer and the paper's far less chemically treated so maybe it'll work better.  Hopefully I can find out soon.