Our  Papermaking  Tour

 We work outside, for this is a wet process.  It begins the night before when we prepare the cotton linters.  They are shredded and blended with water and stored overnight in buckets.

We have been saving flower petals and parts all summer as well as insect parts that we have found, we are also using leaves of the season.

The two piece mold is lowered into the vat containing water, cotton linters,
flower petals, moss and leaves.

The mold is lifted gently with a shaking movement to settle and intertwine the fibers and the top half of the mold called the deckle is removed.

The wet fibers are couched onto a felt and in this case Sue has included flower petals,
the wings of dragonflies and butterflies.  Then another thin layer of wet fibers are couched
over that to sandwich the parts.

After couching several layers of wet fibers the stack is  pressed so that most of the water is squeezed out and then individual sheets of paper are laid in the sun to dry.

We will use this paper we have made for our Holiday Cards and for Book Binding Projects.