Thank-you to my friends…

Thank-you to my friends who rounded up organics from their gardens for me to include in the paper I hand-made.  I ended up with some amazing dried flower petals, leaves, grasses, and more to add in to the tubs of wet pulp I used to make my paper!  Also a huge thanks to my friend Bruce M. who made me this beautiful paper press to flatten the hand-made paper once it had line dried.   Printing my linocuts onto this paper resulted in some very unique and charming artworks.

The hand-pulled original print shown above is called Ground Cover with the artwork being 2.75” x 6.75” in size. First I carved the design into a piece of linoleum, then I inked the linoleum, laid it on the bed of my roller press, placed a piece of the paper I hand-made over top, covered the lot with press blankets and rolled it through the press. The design includes bunchberry, wild strawberries and wild ginger which grow wild in Manitoba and are foraged for nutritional or medicinal uses. The paper was from the first batch I made - it was a mixture of whatever office papers or junk mail I had previously shredded and bagged for recycling. So far I’ve made five different batches of paper. I’ve kept a log of what was incorporated into each batch, wanting each batch to be distinctly different in appearance. For example, the brown paper in the above right photo was made from emptied used teabags, plus brown bag paper and used loose leaf tea leaves.

The urge to get back at making more hand-made paper grows stronger each day. Since our move to this location, I’ve been saving up a large bin full of used papers telling myself that it will be time to make more paper once that bin is full. It is now overflowing and it is time to sort, shred and set up for paper making. I’ve got some calcium carbonate (acid reducer) and gelatin (sizing) on order from a health food store and once that arrives there will be no excuses not to make paper!

Enjoy your day everyone!