Paper Making

My first ever hand made paper... I'm quite excited by the opportunity to make my own paper - is that sad?

Here's some photos of my first 4 sheets....

It's so straight forward, but you can make it much more interesting by adding in the odd leaf here and the odd banana there - yes, you can make banana paper. Above you can see the blue hand towel featured in one sheet..

This is a close up, just so you can see the texture... I get so excited by all this!! You use cotton linters paper as a base, it's pretty sturdy when dry, but once you soak it in water, it just separates and disperses in the water - blend it - and there's your paper pulp.. Then you use a frame called a deckle to place in the 'pulp bath' which gathers the fibers, once the water is sponged out
I love the texture created, I love touchy feely stuff, just makes it all look that little bit better... I also found out the lovely irregular wavy edges are called 'deckled edges', due to the use of the deckle and frame.

For the sheet below I used a piece of string to emboss the paper. It's a really pretty and actually quite a crisp effect. You can also see a crease down the centre of the page - a note to make sure the Jay cloth the paper dries on needs to be non-creasing... unless I want that look of course.

So my plan is to take the drop in opportunity on Tuesday, (the only day I'm free this week), and take a load of random bits and pieces in, flowers, leaves, tea bags, herbs, glitter, cotton threads, brown paper, food colouring, a kiwi skin (thanks to Vickie)... I'll just go ahead and see what happens!
I'll post some more photos up here once they're dried.

Plans after that..... ? ? ?

Build up a collection of samples, and possibly printing onto them?
Use this handmade paper for my live brief for the gift packaged calendars.*** Which I need to start looking back at - create a few prototypes for when I go home this weekend?***
At a later date create sketch books, I'm considering this area for enterprise.. "hand made gifts" for sale - continue idea of my handmade cards and other gifts/crafts/packaging; not my idea of a career, but it's something that I hope to pursue in my own time and can be applied to the real world.