Paper Making

No, I'm not in such a deperate need of toilet paper that I turned to making it myself.
The current lockdown has the 'advantage' that I finally got around trying out some things I wanted to do for quite some time.
One of those is making my own paper using the traditional method of using a paper mold (I used an old picture frame and window screen) and a furnish (shredded paper I soak in water over night, and then processed to get a fine suspension of the fibres in the water)

Dipping the frame into the water and pulling it out afterwards, leaves a thin layer of fibres on the screen. I then carefully dip it on some fabric (I used new floor wipes), pressout some of the water with a sponge until I can seperate the screen from the sheet. This doesn't always work well (the less material - thinner paper - you have the harder it gets), but more often than not I managed to get the sheet where it's suppose to go.

Once on the wipes, I hang the paper up for drying.
That's all there is to it, really.

On my first round of paper making, I didn't have a big enough tub for larger sheets of paper, so I started out with 13 x 13cm (about 5 x 5 inch).
There, among other things, I experimented with using a piece of lace for the screen, and it came out beautifully. Sadely I don't have enough for a bigger size, but I do plan on getting more.

There are so many different ways you can play around with this technique. Here I had some blue in my suspension, and also added some shredded fabric.
I also had a batch of green, made exclusively from egg cartons (yeah, recycling)

At one point I tried to work with dried and pressed flower pedals (didn't work out so well, as they stained the paper yellow).
Then I cut out shapes from the paper of the first trial run (blue) and added them to the freshly sieved paper (white). That worked very well, actually.

Once I had enough paper, I actually bound it into a little booklet. The front for the green one is a piece of scrap marbled paper I got in Venice last year. As the cover is rather on the thin side, I close it with a little bow.

 Finally, I bound a little book, using some of my stitching as a cover for the blue paper.

I'm very new to paper making, but I find this is super fun and quite addictive.
Only problem, if I ever should run of toilet paper (not risk of that at the moment), I don't really know if I would want to use that paper. It's not soft enough ;-)