Western Papermaking (Papermaking with Rag)

[Music] do [Music] uh we are today going to make paper from the material that we gathered from the street yesterday so we went around the streets and we visited all the different free stores and we gathered up some rag material we gathered up here's a cotton on a dress here's a cotton shirt the color of the material that we gathered will determine the color of the paper so if you have a blue shirt you will make blue paper i have a black shirt we'll make black paper so here is a button flannel shirt this is a good amount of fiber and so when gathering your material you want to make sure that it is as much as close to 100 cellulose as possible so you want to have cotton linen or hemp are the most common materials for textiles if you have a an article clothing that has some polyester in it or some kind of rayon or some kind of elastic you just want to make sure that the majority of it is cotton hemp or linen and if it has like a 70 polyester or fleece or something then i would not use it for paper making okay so here uh today we want to make white paper so here is kind of like a some white cotton textile that we found it's absolutely perfect for making paper it's already in a square and so to cut up the material what i'm going to do here i have a plastic mat cutting mat and then there's two ways to cut really primarily you can use a pair of scissors these work really well if you want to keep your scissors sharp you can purchase a sharpener which then you can kind of sharpen it scissors work fine they're a little antiquated or what i like to do most commonly here we use the rolly cutter these are about 30 at your local art store so this is an olfa rotary cutter and then i'm going to cut up my material basically just want to cut it into pieces that are about the size of a postage stamp so i've laid it out just slicing it up being careful not to cut my fingers off and the rotary cutter is by far the most superior way to test your energy so here i sliced it up into pieces you really don't need to go much bigger smaller than this for the machine that we have if you're going smaller than this you're really just wasting your time so after i cut up my material i put it in a bucket and i'm going to cut up this entire [Music] so now we have our rag separated we have one pound in each bucket get about 400 grams in each bucket and we are going to hydrate it by getting it wet with the hose that's good beater the hollander beaters main function is to basically grind up the rag so it's going to separate the weave and then it's going to refine the cotton uh hemp or flax linen or other cellulose material into pulp that we can use for paper making so there's a roll here that will spin around and we add water so we're going to close the roll put the top on then i'm going to add some water about two buckets of water here i'm going to turn it on now i'm going to add the iraq [Applause] so so so [Music] so our help is finished and now we're going to pull the plug and clean it exactly now we drain the rest [Music] [Music] to the paper making process is that we have a vat which here i have a shower a european shower basin that i filled with water and then i have what is called a mold and a decal and the mold is the frame that we use to capture the pulp and the decal is the frame that we use to give shape to the piece of paper so here's the mold and the deco together and what i'm going to do is i'm going to extend my arms out from my body and i'm going to scoop it into the water all the way down making it level and flat with the ground and then i'm going to pull it straight up and then shake it side to side and to and from we basically want to shake it gently side to side and to and from as a way to distribute the fiber evenly and to get the fibers to lock uh into one another okay so i demonstrate without the pulp extending my arms out to my body [Music] then after the pulp is settled i rest the mold and decal and let the water drain out and take the deco off and remove the next step okay so now i demonstrate this we take the pulp because there's no palm in here we're going to add quite a bit so we add about eight scoops of pulp three four five [Music] six seven [Music] the more pulp we add the thicker the sheet will be so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to hog the bat which is to mix it up clogging the uh that is basically agitating the pulp and circulating it by kind of rocking your hands like chassis and uh this is very important to do now after the bat is hogged i take my mold and my decal i scooped my molded neck into the water pull it up and i shake it gently side to side so you see it's a very gentle shape [Music] i let the sheet of paper rest and the water will drain out to remove the decal and i can check the thickness by looking at the what's called the loft of the sheet of paper if it looks really uneven or too thin i can throw it back into the water so if i accidentally start prying and i make some holes these are called paper makers tears or if i shake too much that's too late now if i shake too much or i damage the piece i can do what's called kissing the sheet back so the kiss at back i just flip over the mold and drop it on the surface and pull it straight up and then the sheet is back in the water so in this way paper making is a very uh forgiving process so now i just have to hog it up again [Music] i take my decal and i take my mold and decal together extending my arms out from my body it straight up gently shaking the side to side [Music] let the water drain out i can remove my decal almost immediately [Music] for every sheet of paper we're going to add two scoops of pulp [Music] one [Music] in that way we will maintain consistency [Music] transfer our freshly formed sheet of paper onto a piece of felting what we have here is a board with some kind of really thick industrial felt from buffalo new york and then some uh pellon or some non-cellulose entertainment that we're going to use so i can take my mold and i can line it up here and then i want to very uh slowly kind of lower it down i don't want to slap it down i just want to gently lower it down push on the back of the mold push it down and then i'm going to open it up like a book and our sheet of paper has transferred okay we've got a little tiny dink up there then after that sheet of paper is is put pushed down pooched then we're going to lower another piece of interfacing on top and then we'll pooch another sheet on top and we'll build what's called a post finished making our sheets of paper and we're going to press it so pressing is very important because it squishes the water out of the paper which speeds up the drying it also pushes the fibers closer together which makes a stronger paper the more pressure you can give the paper the stronger the paper of pressure and you can see the water coming out so we will press it for a few minutes here and let the water come out and then we will hang it to dry [Music] and take our sticky so once the paper comes out of the press it actually is really durable and you can move it around quite easily so from here we're going to take the post right out paper off with the interfacing attached and we're going to hang it up here to dry kind of like hanging your clothing to dry kind of gently pulling it up and it doesn't really matter which way they're facing if you hang things to dry they generally will dry in a matter of a day or two if you want to speed up the drawing you can turn on a fan to surface the air after the paper is dry we will peel the paper off of the interfacing and then put it back in the press i've pressed and dried the paper so we've taken the paper down from the line and now we are going to peel the paper off of the interfacing this paper actually has already started to come off a lot of the interfacing so you can see here we have the sheet of paper that is dry the paper is going to dry with some kind of curl or wonk sometimes it pulls away from the interfacing and so we want to do is put it between some boards so we're going to make another pile of paper put it between some boards and then we are going to put it into another press which is called a standing press and we will leave it in the standing press for at least 48 hours but typically you leave it in the standing press until you want to use it okay so it's very important to peel the paper off the interfacing make another pile very neatly pile the paper on top of each other and then we're going to load it back into a standing press and we will leave it there paper is all peeled off and it is put into a pile kind of neatly placed into a pile on top of each other and i'm going to slide it into our standing press here we have paper and then if you have sheets that are maybe more creative or they have texture or these ones are not like they've been folded so they're not the same size we do not want to press them with the normal size pieces because they will leave an indentation uh on those pieces so what we will do is instead we will put them between some of the felts we put down the felt and then we put our sheets of paper because they're very similar so i think we can just kind of get away with putting them together like this and then we'll put another felt on top like this and then we are going to put the board on top like this and here we are going to build up the press um [Music] up even more with more boards and so now we have our press built up we were a little creative with the way that we stacked it and this is just a 5 000 kilogram press so we're going to press it into that's pretty good so we don't want to give it a lot of pressure a couple reasons we'll break the press probably and the other thing is we don't really need a lot of pressure we're just going to give it some weight to um to push down on the paper the key is to give it some pressure and then let it sit for for uh at least a couple days and then keep it underway a good rule of thumb is to keep your paper underway until you use it whether it's a cinder block or a big rock or a park your car on it or something like that here we have this press over the next few days as we're making more paper this works a lot [Music] you

Channel: Drew Matott

Views: 67,051

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Id: j9Pvk-mzEUs

Length: 21min 8sec (1268 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 19 2020