I made a paper-making date with Cynthia for the last weekend of a glorious sunny October. I had the pulp ready and cooked and 10 minutes before she arrived the wind howled and rained leaves and water – not conducive to making paper as I need to do it outdoors and you don’t want water drops and leaves falling on your wet fresh sheets of paper.
I ran the Pulperizer and brought some pulp into the kitchen where we did a dozen or so sheets, and I was again hasty about adding cotton to the pulp as the fiber holds together better, and the initial sheet I pulled from pure pulp didn’t hold together. It just wasn’t the right day, so we sat down to wine and cheese and a chat laced with art show-and-tell. But when I looked at the pure pulp attempt later it struck me as totally beautiful, so I immediately gathered more ginkgo leaves to try the pure pulp again. So I made a date with myself the next sunny day so I could use up the existing pulp, which I left in the Pulperizer in the garage, intent on using it while it was still fresh and usable. The next attempt the muses were with me.
I ran the Pulperizer and brought some pulp into the kitchen where we did a dozen or so sheets, and I was again hasty about adding cotton to the pulp as the fiber holds together better, and the initial sheet I pulled from pure pulp didn’t hold together. It just wasn’t the right day, so we sat down to wine and cheese and a chat laced with art show-and-tell. But when I looked at the pure pulp attempt later it struck me as totally beautiful, so I immediately gathered more ginkgo leaves to try the pure pulp again. So I made a date with myself the next sunny day so I could use up the existing pulp, which I left in the Pulperizer in the garage, intent on using it while it was still fresh and usable. The next attempt the muses were with me.
Here are the ginkgo leaves before and after cooking them.
And here is the pure ginkgo paper wet and fresh and later dried.
It was a beautiful day, I oriented myself to enjoy my yard while I pulled sheets from the pulp, the squirrels were playing, the birds were busy and the autumn hum was wonderful – here’s my paper making studio:
I worked with embossing the paper, which was successful with the paper I made after adding cotton liner to the pure ginko pulp, but it’s difficult to portray the subtlety of the embossing in a photograph. Here’s an attempt:
After pulling the sheets I immediately pressed the embossing item (a leaf on the left, and a random cutout on the right (remnant that was left over from another project which I’ll share later). After cleaning up, I took all the sheets inside and put each sheet between newsprint and used a rolling pin to embed the embossing more deeply and extract more of the water. Then I used this borrowed press to finish pressing the sheets – it’s an old dry press probably from the fifties and worked great.
Here’s the press and my assortment of pure ginkgo leaf and ginkgo leaf/cotton pages:
Here’s the press and my assortment of pure ginkgo leaf and ginkgo leaf/cotton pages: