Recycling Paper

So I have a fairly recent fascination with paper. Well, I guess a refascination. I learned how to make paper way back in elementary school for a Girl Scout badge. That was a small rectangle of course purple paper. Pretty much just newsprint and food dye.

This past summer I made paper with my cousins. We gathered green bamboo leaves from the ground in the backyard and blended them to make the slurry. I ended up adding a little blended newspaper because I was afraid the bamboo wouldn't stick together. I have no clue if it actually needed that though.

To make our frame, I just cut a rectangle out of a foam tray with an exacto knife and staple some wire mesh across it. The slurry was put in a plastic bin the size of a shoe box and sifted around to catch the pulp. Once there was plenty on the screen, I just placed paper towels on both sides and pressed some water out. They dried on the porch and eventually I popped them out of the frame and put them on a drying rack.

The paper was thick and coarse but it maintained the natural green color of the leaves without any dye! That was very cool. I think I could have used a cloth, like cheese cloth, instead of the mesh to make something with a finer texture. To make it thinner, we could have rolled it between the paper towels with a rolling pin.

The pieces were so small because of the frame and so they weren't of too much use. We ended up using them to mat some photos we took at the zoo that summer before we put them in frames. It looked really cool!

SInce then, I have really wanted to make more paper. So, I have been keeping paper in my apartment! Matt doesn't really like it too much, I think, but it's better now that I organized it. That was simple -- I just turned some cereal boxes inside-out so they were brown and stacked them. Instant paper organizer!

Hopefully this summer I can make a larger frame using a picture frame and some cheese cloth. And I want to use a mortar and pestle to grind the paper into pulp. That way the paper would be recycled without the use of any energy! I also want to experiment with different leaves and such with different combinations of paper. Should be an eventful summer!