The ancient craft of papermaking has found a place at the Bosque.
Using both recycled paper and fibers we collect in the forest, we have started to make many different test batches of paper.
The process took awhile to get going… Suzanne, Brie, Ben, Dominik, Charles, Trevor, and others have all contributed to our developing knowledge about papermaking.
We made a block and deckle by making frames out of cherry wood, and attaching plastic mesh to one of the frames:
We collected many fibers from the forest to experiment, including stalks of the red hot poker, which we have been propagating heavily over the last few years:
And we had a blender attachment made for a drill in order to process large quantities of fibrous pulp.
The results have been great! Volunteers and visitors have had fun experiementing with different ways to make the paper pretty and useful. Some of the fiber combinations we can fold for potential notecard products.
Type of fibers we have been trying are the red hot poker stems, maguey leaves, madrone bark, newspaper, toilet paper rolls, bamboo, and others. As we identify native plants we hope to test all of them for their papermaking usefulness.
