Friday, 8 May 2009

Pea Paper



Not to be confused with paper that you use in the toilet to deal with pee.
I picked up a book from the library The Art of Papermaking with Plants by Marie-Jeanne Lorente. I adapted it to more organic methods, using wood ash as a lye solution rather than caustic soda. It worked well, I let the pea vine and leaves, which were already dry and brown rot down for weeks in the solution and then cooked it for several hours on the wood stove. I played around with the mix making paper that was purely the plant pulp and then added pulped recycled paper and created a different paper from that. I've got beans, pumpkin and tomato stems to use next, though, no doubt the goats will think it a waste.

3 comments:

Sharon said...

Great! No doubt the goats will try and sneak in and eat your 'gourmet' delights!!

Wocket said...

I loved the papers in that book but couldn't figure out how to dispose of the lye solution in any nice environmental way. What did you do with yours? Did you neturalise the paper at all? I made my paper out of the strands from a clump of mother-in-laws-tongue. Lovely but required lots of washing and bleaching. :(

Linda Cockburn said...

Hi Renee,
I used wood ash combined with water, which is organic, just very alkaline. After I'd finished with it I diluted it considerably before putting it around trees that could do with a lime. I didn't use any bleach, wonder if you could use peroxide in future? which is much less of an issue.
How did the paper go? Would love to see a pic of that.