Burnie -> Rosevears (via Stanley and Wynyard and Penguin)






We’d booked a paper making workshop in Wynyard, so we beetled off to that. Unlike “The Pulp”, Creative Papers is still around after several decades, but they haven’t been bought up by companies with ulterior motives. They produce handmade papers. Handmade does not mean tool free – the beater machines bash fibers into a slurry, and the straight sided vats are perfect for keeping the exactly shaped A-sized screens level. Large felt mats absorb moisture, aided by a huge press, and the sheets dry on moveable vertical walls. Even the little watermark screens we used were much more professional (and effective) than any of my previous paper making attempts!
We learned that you can make paper out of pretty much any plant fiber. At Creative Papers, they use the following:
Recycled cotton towels (consistency)
Cotton thread (pre dyed spools, adds colour)
Hemp (adds strength)
Poops (added texture and fun)
Eucalyptus (remarkably fast growing fiber)
We learned that lignin is a cell structure component in plant fiber, but it defragmemts readily when exposed to UV. For some things (maybe a watercolour you want to last for ages), this matters, so you cook the lignin out, but lignin adds bulk to your slurry, so for things like newspaper where the news will be old and irrelevant in a few days, the lignin makes your slurry go further. The slurry in the vat today was low in lignin with real seeds in it, which was a regular order from an artist who commissions “seedy” paper for cards.





Alice and Flis

At the paper making did you have to provide your own poops?
XXXMom
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