The paper I have made contains a range of wildflower seeds and was made with the idea people can use the paper to create positive grief experiences. You can use the paper to write a memory on, a message or a poem. Perhaps even a drawing or a painting. When you are finished with your paper and ready to plant it you can simply plant the paper in soil, water it and watch it grow.
Paper making
Making paper for the first time with little to no instruction is not a fast activity. In total I think the process took a little over six hours but I now know all of the things you shouldn’t do when making seed paper and further to this experience have made paper a little more successfully. I will say this however, if I managed to get a stack of successfully made seed paper from this experience, everyone can make seed paper at home. I would just recommend doing a little more research beforehand and having a blender to hand.
When going into making paper I knew that I first needed paper and I knew I needed to make the paper break apart. That’s about as much as I knew and I naively thought one YouTube video and a how to make paper guide would give me all of the answers. What actually happened was I had begun and I did not know what I was doing.
After adding one layer of paper into the box and some water it didn’t look enough so the cycle of adding paper and water continued until the bucket was half full of soggy paper. I had chosen a colour palette of pink, yellows and whites for base as a reflection of the colours of the flowers that will grow from this paper.
By the time I reached the second image it dawned on me that this paper may not be successful and also that I may have needed a blender. The before mentioned YouTube video had also told me this at the beginning. It was also clear that the colour forming was not what I had hoped at all. At this stage we had two problems the paper was clearly too thick and was not breaking down at all. It is possible to breakdown the paper without a blender as I found out. It is time consuming and requires quite a lot of patience but if you knead the paper eventually it does start to look better.
The colour only got worse.
You’ll notice the third picture does not have “step three” on it and that is because adding the seeds at this stage was a mistake.
This did not occur to me until much later but due to the volume of paper, once I had reached the stage of actually forming the paper the seeds had been wet for quite some time. When drying the paper a few of the pieces had started spouting.
This should not happen during the drying stage and there are a number of reasons this happened. Firstly, the seeds were wet for far too long and the paper drying situation was not helpful in this. It was helpful to know that the paper will grow when it is planted.
The seeds mix used for the paper is a little different than the seeds I used for the memorial mix. This was so that if I decided to give them out together, there would be more variety where they are planted.
The paper seed mix, though has some crossovers with the memorial mix, also contains: yellow sun flowers, red sun flowers and mallow.
Eventually the paper broke down enough that the the new paper was formable and it was at this point I realised the main mistake was the water to paper ratio. This was evident during the first few sheets, no matter what I did the paper was coming our very thick which proved very hard to dry. If you are going to attempt to make any kind of paper at home I would suggest starting small or having a drying rack to hand. Drying large amounts of paper with limited flat surfaces is a task all of its own and this was an issue for the seeds. When drying the paper, much of the wet paper ended up in stacks so, thankfully the weather was very hot and thus the paper did dry but had it not of been for the heatwave I think much of the paper would still be wet.
As the paper started to dry the colour looked a lot better and the specks of colour I believe worked really well. Though the sheets were not very uniform and some such as the ones above had broken into pieces, I did successfully get many usable sheets of seed paper.
Once all of the paper was dry I cut up the paper into smaller sheets and started experimenting with the paper.
I was surprised that the paper held watercolour extremely well. The thickness of the paper holds the paint and it doesn’t bleed though I would not recommend use water near the paper until ready to plant. Due to the texture of the paper I had concerns about if people would actually be able to use the paper to write on.
Commenti