Do You Ever Go On a Craft & More Buying Spree??

  I try not to buy too much more in craft supplies cause I just already have so much in my craft room.
   However, this week I have been on a buying spree for sure 
        ha ha fun though. 
   I want to play with making papers for eco printing. The Kitchen Witch either buys or makes cotton rag paper and sometimes combines with hemp.  Her paper feels like cloth so I can see now why it prints so nice.
  So online I went to shop. I ended up finding hemp roving for spinning-will just break that down and cook it down with the soda ash. I also was looking for cotton rag, and there is also cotton linters these are a bit different I think.
     I ended up going back to Grummer's paper making site. I wanted the cotton rag since that is what the artist uses  so will see how it will blend up in my blender-fingers crossed.  
     Grummer also had kona pulp made from the burlap sacks of kona coffee. It was such a pretty brown that I thought it would blend nicely with the grass papers and thinking a coffee aroma too. and I really needed more couch papers-to absorb the water from the papers-I really like theirs so got another package. One could use towels and just change them allot-but sometimes those might imprint texture into the papers-depending on the towels.

Update: My friend Barbara and I have been talking handmade papers and she explained the difference of cotton rag and linters thanks Barbara

"Cotton linters and cotton rag are different things. Cotton linters are a by-product of the cotton harvest. It comes either in a puffy state a bit like cosmetic cotton balls, and also in sheets. I think the sheets need to be soaked before use, so I went with the puffy kind. It can be put into the blender right out of the bag. I think “linters” is a word only used in the harvesting of cotton, so not the same as pulp. 

Cotton rag pulp is from used cotton clothing and rags, so there may be threads in it. I just looked again, and it says “blender friendly for blenders 800 Watts and up”. So I looked at my old blender that I use for crafting, it’s really old and was given to me by someone who didn’t want it, and it’s 825 Watts. You can  look on the bottom of your. If it’s not over 800 Watts, I’d try the cotton rag pulp anyhow and just watch as you start blending to be sure rag threads don’t get caught around the blades. It will probably be OK."

    I also did my year buy for Hubs wheat flour for baking. I found online at Wal Mart they have good prices for King Arthur flours. So I bought a 25 pound bag of unbleached all purpose that I will break down into zip lok bags and also their white whole wheat-which is the whole grain but looks like white flour-a more healthy flour. So I am set for a year now.
   I also found sprouted brown rice which I am going to grind into flour for my bread. There has been allot of reports out for several years now about arsenic levels in rice-there seems to be no clear cut answers and organic also has the arsenic. I have read that the more water used in cooking the rice flushes out allot of the arsenic-so my thought is the sprouting process of the rice uses water-so less arsenic.  It is not a real concern probably as long as you eat rice every day.

  I also ordered a few books and a KC Royals baseball sweatshirt too-so the fun thing now-packages are coming everyday in the mail-I love mail 😊


I cut up another watermelon for us-the wildlife love the rind and eat the whole piece-here is a squirrel getting first serve before the deer find it

      My ceiling flourescent light still won't come on since it's summer-we need to change that so I can work on my journal pages in there-I love working on my big desk. We have the older style I guess-we already changed the one in Hubs office space.

    So tonight I think I will spin some bison roving.

Have an awesome weekend everyone!!