Some may have seen posts from me on Facebook about printing linocuts onto paper made from fiber gathered in our garden. It worked, and gave me an appetite to do more. Fast-forward by nearly two years:
A few weeks ago I cooked two seasons' worth of Crocosmia ('Lucifer') fiber, rinsed it and did a small paper making experiment with it. Here is the fiber and cooking set-up:
And there was a lot of learning so far. For example, cook and test a small batch before cooking the whole amount. Secondly, only cook one tissue type at a time (leaves in this case), rather than greedily cook everything including flower stalks and seed heads.
But - after 3 3/4 hours of cooking I decided that I either haven’t got the right amount of alkali in the cooking water (quite likely as I didn't weigh the dry fiber before cooking), or it’s been done for some time and I don’t know how to recognise the signs. I suspect the former. This is not a huge deal since I can always start up the cooking again at a future date with more alkali.
In the meantime I am sharing some photos - the cooked plant material, a small batch after blending (and snipping longer fibers into tiny bits), and my A6 paper mould and deckle with the fiber on - and here came another grand surprise, it seems there was so much tiny particulate matter in the pulp, that it would not drain through the sieve! And no, it wasn't a surprise retention agent making it more gloopy. The third image was afer 15 min of ‘draining’ and it was nowhere near ready to couch, and the final image some time later with the paper finally couched. I dried it between pieces of aluminium foil using a hot iron, and whilst coarse, the paper surprised me by being naturally quite able to take watercolour paint without running too much, but as said, it needs more work.
This is no great deal. For a larger batch I’d finely chop the rewetted fiber (the remainder is drying on a drying rack lined with cotton) like I would chop herbs for cooking, and then blend - and make a new mould and deckle from two old picture frames and some finely meshed fly door material to allow the water to drain more freely.
Loving a technical challenge and it will be so nice when I get this right - prints made on paper from my own garden.
Add comment
Comments