Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Corn Husk Papers Update

      In my previous post I shared how I cooked and broke down the husk fibers. This morning early I got out my blender and my paper making items  Five hours later I have a few sheets of papers-more like art papers then paper but paper none the less. Was it worth all the time-not sure lol   
   This was not as easy as making papers with recycled papers which I really enjoy doing.

   The first couple of sheets I re did over 4 times-the problem was getting the sheet off the plastic. After sponging the water out it seemed to just really stick to that plastic sheet.  Over half way through I decided this is just not working. So I decided Not to sponge at all-let the sheet drain on the plastic grid piece and screen for a bit and then put a blotting paper on top-flipped it over- added more blotting papers and then used my trusty heavy encyclopedia book-that I only use for this now lol-and the paper came off the blotting papers better than the plastic. I still ended up with no perfect sheets-so decided this was an art project instead of just handmade papers.

  Here are some photos. These sheets turned out nice and green because I got the corn husks from a friend's home grown corn and she had left those outer dark green husks on so I included those. Am anxious to see how they dry and what shade of green they will be.
   In the photos the darkest greens are thicker papers which I didn't really want but since I had redone so many pieces I just didn't do those over.
   Also half way through the process my water and pulp got really foamy. My friend Barbara had mentioned that she added some gelatin to the pulp mixture so when writing on the papers they won't bleed-I re use the water when making more pulp so I am thinking I added in too much gelatin which resulted in that foam. I ended up just hand scooping most of that out.

All photos will enlarge just click on them

   All of you paper artists-any ideas on how to use these? thanks



Normally you would have the screen on top of this and then blot water out with a sponge.



I use my deep freezers for laying out projects like this-I have two so gives me lots of space





8 comments:

  1. Hi Kathy! Oh my goodness, what a gorgeous green color you got with those corn husks. Can't wait to see them dried. Glad you got to see the eclipse. It was fun! Have a great week!

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  2. Wonderful green. I especially love the edges of the pages

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  3. Came out pretty green colors, Kathy! Plus, I was exhausted after only one sheet. Is it worth it? I've decided not, unless I come up with a way to use it that I like. But to me, it's also worth something to be able to say I did it in the pure, traditional way.

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  4. I love the green. It's really green. It looks like it's nice artsy paper, but looks like so much work. But you don't know how it goes until you try. :) Thanks for sharing

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  5. A wonderful natural paper - I would use it on collages!

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  6. I am in love with green since always!
    how amazing talent you have to transform it into a natural paper .
    i remember once in school our drawing teacher taught us to make paper by raw wasted papers pieces

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  7. Fascinating! Great to see how it dried out in your next post! Hugs, Chrisx

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