So I'm inspired by my last post Paper craft book review: Painted Pages and getting excited about doing more collage and mixed media work. Plus, I'm getting ready to do an online workshop and thought I'd better go through my stash of handmade papers. When I say stash, I really mean rolls and stacks and boxes of handmade paper, stashed in nooks and crannies in my office, in my basement and in various parts of the Botanical PaperWorks facility.
When I started my paper company 15 years ago (get the story here), I started collecting handmade papers. Some of the paper sheets in my collection were handmade by me, others were collected during my travels or given to me as gifts.
I've written a lot about papermaking with different fibres in our three books, and some of my favorites are shown below:
Flax makes a strong, beautiful sheet.
Kozo can be well-beaten to produce a hard, crunchy sheet. The paper above was painted with colored pulp while the sheet was still immersed in the vat.
This sheet is so thin, the light shines through.
And this amate paper from Mexico is full of holes!
And then there's paper made with vegetable fibers...
Yes, it's made with cooked rhubarb!
And paper can be made from materials found in nature such as:
While looking through my paper collection, I was thrilled to find these marbled paper sheets:
and this red one:
There's a lot more to go through, but I think I'll get started with this. You can't clean out a decade and a half in just one session.
