Why haven't I done so already? Probably because YouTube didn't exist back then and I had no idea how to go about it. Then, when I was into my period SCA phase I wanted to learn to make paper using authentic, period ways, and that didn't include paper pulp or blenders.
Now that I'm freed from trying to be historical, and into being practical, I decided to give it a go. I tore up a weekly local paper/advertisement that we get (whether we want it or not) and decided to make paper. Here are the lessons learned:
1) Choose your container carefully. My first attempt included a bucket that had base legs. The base bumped out into the bucket so I didn't have a flat surface to work with. This got in my way a few times when trying to submerge my screen and was generally a huge pain in the butt.
2) Add the dye to the pulp, not the water. My paper is pretty much gray. I later tried to add dye to the pulp and I think it improved a little bit, but it's still pretty gray. I also added a few flower petals, but you can't see much of that either.
3) Have your cloths cut out before you begin. Unless you can do this better than me, you need a different cloth for each piece of paper. This is how you lift the paper from the screen and allow it to dry. When it's dry it should slip free from the fabric easily (or so I'm told, my paper is still drying).
4) I had an aha moment that I wish I'd had the first attempt. If you use a picture frame, your screen will have a perfectly flat side and an inside where the picture usually goes. The pulp goes into the screen like a picture. Put pulp in a tub of water, emerge the screen into the water/pulp, raise it up slowly, and sift the pulp like you would if you were panning for gold, spreading the pulp out evenly. This was the hardest part for me because nothing I saw online clearly showed this. Likely because a person's so busy trying to make the pulp spread evenly that they can't also take a picture at the same time. Not enough hands I guess.
5) DO use a sponge. After you lift the frame from the bucket and drape the frame with your precut fabric, take a sponge and press the water through the screen. A sponge works well because you can wring it out a lot. Messy isn't the right word for this project. Drippy is. It's hard to get the water out of the pulp mixture.
6) Lift the fabric from the screen, not the screen from the fabric. At least this was my experience. I lost some corners trying to lift the screen off rather than do it the other way round.
7) Iron if you don't have kids around. I don't know what some of these people are talking about. I put an old cotton window curtain down, put another layer on time and ironed. Since it's still pretty wet this creates a bunch of steam. This had burn written all over it. Maybe your kids are super well behaved, maybe your iron doesn't spew hot water, but I'd be careful and try this first before presenting it as a kid project. I saw other links that didn't use irons, one YouTube broadcast with kids as instructors, and they used a towel and rolling pin instead.
8) This project took about 1 hour to do 4 small pieces of paper and 3 larger pieces of paper, and then write about it.
9) Use junk mail/recyclables. You might as well, it'll save a bunch of chemical processing, and it really doesn't take much to make paper. I'm guessing one neighborhood newspaper (which is pretty small, but not totally minuscule) would make 8 to 10 pieces of 8 X 10 paper.
10) Imperfection is okay. At least that's what I'm telling myself since it took a while to get the hang of it. Maybe you'll be a paper natural, if you are, good for you. I had to learn from failure. But it was fun, and worth the time spent figuring it out. I'm not looking forward to cleaning up the mess...
when blending pulp, put a lid on the blender...
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