How to create recycled pulp

Gather together various kinds of used papers. The kind of paper you use to start with will dictate the quality of paper you end up with. If you use brown paper bags, the paper you make will look like a brown paper bag. Gather a variety of papers. Newspaper, office paper, junk mail and envelopes, etc. Tissue paper from gift wrapping adds a parchment kind of finish to papers. Sort them into colors and types of paper. Tear each pile up into small sized pieces, about the size of a postage stamp and set to soak seperately in a pail of water. Keep colors and types of paper seperate. Eventually you will combine a blend of different types of paper in the formation vat. When I make stationary I like to use white office paper (about 75% concentration), a little bit of brown paper bag (about 10% concentration) for color and that "natural" look, along with a cup or two of tissue paper (about 15%). Experiment on various different concentrations.

[Photo: Blended water and paper poured into vat]

Gift wrap paper is a good way to get different colors. If you use a piece that has a number of different colors on it, when you blend the whole sheet you will get a kind of grey color. If you want all and only blue, you will have to tear out those pieces from the rest. As you tear up paper, be mindful of the colors of printing and sort out the reds, from the yellows, greens and blues. By making sepearte piles and keeping it all seperated, when it is blended you will be able to make different colored papers.

Soak the torn up paper for 2-3 days outside. In cool climates you can leave heavy weight paper soaking for a couple of weeks. In hot and humid climates, the paper may spoil rather quickly. You can tell by the smell if it has gone sour. Very heavy weight tagboard will have to be cooked to break down. I have a canning kettle that I use for paper only. When I break down very heavy weight paper I soak it for a couple of days and then cook it for an hour on a slow simmer.

After cooking, or simply soaked for a few days, take about 1/2 cup of torn paper to two cups of water and buzz it in a blender on high speed for about 1 minute. The heavier the paper, the longer you will have to blend it. Two minutes is really about the maximum. Pay attention to the sound of the blender motor. If it is working too hard, then you have too much pulp and not enough water for easy functioning. I blend up a large quantity of pulp at a time. Each blender full gets seived and the pulp set into an empty dish pan still keeping the various types of paper sepearte, i.e., seperate dish pans for each color and type (or do one type at a time). The next step is to form a sheet of paper. On to forming paper.

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