papermaking

After a few unsuccessful attempts at handmaking recycled paper on very large frames, I broke down and asked for help to resize my frames so they would fit in a bucket, like all the hobby-mommy bloggers have. Help was graciously given, and I found myself with a proper handmade mould and deckle for paper roughly 10″x12″, made from thrift store wooden frames and hardware store window screen. Astonishingly, practicing a craft the way everyone has always been doing it actually works. Who would have thought?

I now make an average of two pages of recycled, handmade paper per day, pulling the paper in the morning before work and tucking them under my bed in front of my Rinnai heater to dry during the day. I described this process to a friend who said, “Sounds like a fire hazard, but alright.” I scoffed. I never set my heater above 68 at the very most, which couldn’t possibly heat paper to ignition point. But then, examining some of the pages I’ve made, I found crispy, brown edges, as on just-cooked phyllo dough. Fire hazard, indeed.

While I haven’t mastered the thin, smooth, letter-writing sheets that I’d imagined, recycled paper is rustic and texturey. I would highly recommend against using it as letter paper, as the one sheet I mailed took three stamps, but there may be other uses for chunky, textured paper. I’ve bound a few fat little notebooks with it for odd, almost-useful-but-mostly-just-entertaining Christmas gifts, and considered (though haven’t yet tried) painting on it.

Each of the paper slurry blends has been composed of slightly different ingredients, but they’re generally made up of junk mail, notes to myself, shopping lists, fliers and strips* from the bookshop where I work, paper bag scraps, bits of used wrapping paper, scrapbooking paper which I bought in 2009 and am definitely never going to use, and any unattended paper which falls into my greedy goblin hands. Does it matter that I haven’t found an actual use for my recycled paper yet? Absolutely not. Somehow the making of a thing, useful or not, desirable or not, is itself compelling, as though creating a pile of something – words, paper, crafts, images, blog posts – is proof of the worthwhileness of existing.

Wishcycling is a thing.

*Strips are a funny piece of trivia for those who have never worked in a bookstore. Bookstores buy books from the publisher at a discount on the price printed on the jacket, and, if they don’t sell, then they send them back to the publisher for credit. Some books aren’t worth enough to the publisher to send back, and so bookstores tear the cover off, mail it back to the publisher, and throw the rest of the book away. These are called “strips,” and are marked next to the barcode with a triangle symbol around an S. Mass markets are almost always strips, as are many kids’ and YA paperbacks.