Following on from my papermaking lesson recently I had my second go on Monday with my own shredded paper. As could be seen from my previous post here I had shredded some of the paper I used to print on during my recent course. I kept the printed area and plain paper surround separate whilst soaking and pulping. This week I used the plain cartridge paper offcuts and the printed areas from cartridge and kozo paper mixed.
I slightly over-pulped the white cartridge fibre and ended up with some very fine paper, probably around 50-60gsm mainly. I stopped pulping earlier with the printed paper and once the two pulps were mixed I had some lovely coloured inclusions. However, obviously, much of the inks mixed, giving me a light grey paper base.
Left: the mixed pulp on the deckle. Right: the wet paper sheet on the couching cloth ready for pressing.
Having taken advice, I decided not to dry my sheets in the sun as I did previously. So I took them home, still wet on the couching cloths, and laid them out on the bathroom floor.
I had made a selection of pristine white and mixed-fibre grey A4 pages and was delighted with them until I turned around to see one of my dogs coming to explore what I was up to. He managed to trample across 8 sheets before I got him out of the room!!
I’ll just print on some interesting paper with dog paw marks and toe holes in now, I guess. Little terror.
Finished paper, some white and some pale grey, with a close-up of the roughly pulped print inclusions.
Next week I’ll have another go and make the paper thicker so I can, hopefully, both print and stitch on it.
TactualTextiles 
The printing colour looks very effective here. I like your choice of leaving the coloured paper larger.
I’ll have another go on Monday and try to make the paper thicker. I’m hoping it will then trap more coloured pieces as well.
Well, obviously it must be interesting to your dog, if you are spending so much time over it that you should be spending with the dogs!
I found I had to add colour to the pulps made from any kind of colour images, if I didn’t want grey. Sorry, didn’t think to mention that! I got quite an interesting colour with a little bit of yellow added.
Dog incursions aside, did it dry better inside?
Hi Nola. Yes it dried much, much better by leaving it on the couching cloths, flat on the bathroom floor out of direct heat until it was 100% dry. The cloths seem to keep the paper flatter and stop the edges curling up and buckling.
When you added a touch of yellow did you get a greenish tinge to your grey? For this experiment I’m happy with the grey as I want to print in blue/black on it and it should look great, but for the future it’s something to think about.
Well, yellow + black = olive when you blend paints and dyes, so that kinda makes sense.
Hi Pia. Yes, you’re right but with the very pale grey I’ve got I don’t want yellow turning it (what my husband calls) goose-s**t green! Green is my favourite colour but it can turn out in so many ways depending on your start grey or black and which yellow you use. I’m thinking of incrementally adding shredded black prints to the pulp so I get a darker and darker grey as I go. Safer than yellow for this experiment I think.
It seemed to liven the colour up from the quite dead grey I got from my coloured pulp. I don’t think I added enough to be green. In any case, remember that the colour is made of all colours – like the story about battleship grey, the colour you get when you combine all the other colours! So you are just tweaking the colour mix back towards yellow.
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