Making Paper

Last week I had a brief induction how to make paper in the ceramics room. It mainly consists of filling large crates with water and pouring various different blended paper pulps in to them. You then use a screen that acts like a sieve to create a new paper. You can mix different pulps together e.g. cotton and linen, and also trap fabrics and objects between paper layers.


This is a blend of cotton paper pulp and coffee granules. It come out quite nicely because as well as the individual pieces of coffee dotted around the paper, it dies the paper an off-white .


This is a pure linen blend. I prefer this to the cotton as it produces a softer but slightly stronger paper. It is also quite nice to print on to (which I have so far only done with potato printing, but plan to also screen print on to).


A cotton blend paper is easy to layer up and create a pretty standard paper. You can either have the edges of your paper crisp and straight (done by using a frame over your sieve screen) or with a rough, torn look.


This was an experiment using cotton paper pulp and trapping little pieces of red coral between layers. Originally this gave a really nice effect, but when I hung the paper up to dry, the dye ran and made a mess of the paper.

This is made from a newspaper print pulp. It creates a smoother surface of paper and tends to dry less stiffly.

Much similar to the first coffee/cotton paper I made, this is just made with slightly more coffee added to the pulp and mixed in, causing the paper to dye a darker, browner colour.

This was my final attempt to successfully trap a material between paper layers. I used a green felt-like material, and left the edges rough to it spilled out slightly around the paper. I don't like this and wouldn't use it to print on.