Teabag paper

Cut up and soaked teabags

I finally found time to use my teabag pulp (made in February) into A4 sheets of paper.

I defrosted the  pulp and was surprised at just how much there was – I drink a lot of tea!

I wasn’t confident that the teabags alone would form good sheets so started with some coarsely pulped white and cream  paper offcuts.

When I make trial prints or have any bad prints I cut off the surrounding paper and use it to make new sheets of paper.  Quality printing paper is expensive and I refuse to waste it.

I started by making a few plain white sheets to see just how coarse I’d left the pulp.

Very  happy with those, very textural.  Although I formed the sheets at Primrose Park Centre I brought them home to dry and rolled them onto my dining room window so they would catch the heat from the sun and dry completely smooth on one side.

Above right you can see the side that was rolled (using a clean print roller) against the window, totally smooth, and on the left is the other side where all the texture comes through.  Once dry and carefully peeled from the window the sheets are completely flat.  A much better method of drying my paper than when I used to lie it on the bathroom floor still on the couching cloths – when it would tend to buckle a little.

My teabags were also coarsely pulped as I hoped to get small inclusions and some texture in the finished sheets, and I did.

On the left is a close up of a section of a sheet clearly showing the uneven surface, and with some small pieces of teabag still evident.

I achieved some lovely paper and by mixing the teabag and white pulp the sheets have come out fairly light, very usable for printing.  Again, they were dried on the window so one side is very smooth and the other textural.

Now to print on them!

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