Last week a client brought in some cedar bark strips for us to try out and make some sample papers. We've never hand pounded a fiber before so it truly was an experiment for us, and we couldn't be more pleased with the results! The dry paper color is close to a rich walnut, it's hard to capture with our phone camera. Here are the steps we went through for those that would like to know. (In the future we'll put info. like this on the papermaking wiki that we're developing.)

1. Soak the bark strips in water overnight.
2. Cook the bark strips in a stainless steel pot with a caustic agent like soda ash, lye or washing detergent. We used washing detergent. This breaks down the cellulose/non-cellulose in the plant. We cooked with 4 tbps. of detergent for 4 hrs. 
3. Thoroughly rinse the bark strips in water to remove impurities and aim for mostly clear water.
4. Start hand pounding the moist bark with a mallet. As you can see from the photos, we did this in small batches to get good contact with the fibers. We beat into a pulp for about 1-1.5 hours. The time isn't as important as just testing the fibers by putting a pinch worth into a glass of water and swirling the fibers around. If there are clumps you need to keep pounding. If the fibers suspend and float evenly throughout the water it's ready to be made into paper. We wanted a mix of short/long fibers so we didn't beat the fibers for the same amount of time. However, other than the water test we could also pull the fibers apart without using much force. They were nice and soft like hair, and we think they look like hair too!
5. Prepare your vat with water and a bit of formation aid. The formation aid helps keep the water from draining too fast when you form a sheet of paper on your mould.
6. Start adding handfuls and half handfuls of bark pulp into your vat. When you think you have enough pulp mixed into the vat make a test sheet of paper. 
7. We ended up dipping our moulds into the vat at least 2 times, sometimes 3, to get even coverage of fibers and not have holes or thin spots in our paper. The fibers also had a tendency to drape over the deckle so we had to carefully pull these off to not mess up the edges of our paper.
8. Couch the paper off your mould and onto pellon interfacing. Make a post of papers.
9. Press your post of paper. We used our 12-ton Aardvark hydraulic press at about 10 tons of pressure.
10. Dry your papers in the air or under restraint. We transferred our pellon sandwiched paper into our restraint drying box and let dry for 24 hrs. 
11. Voila- you've got beautiful cedar bark paper!

It's officially Back to School season and it seems like everyone is trying to squeeze as much summer fun out of August as they can. At the studio we're taking stock of what the heck we've been up to and evaluating the highs and lows. Over the past 2 months we've participated in the Mississippi Street Fair, Portland's first Urban Air Market, the Alberta Street Fair, and the Hawthorne Evening Market. We also taught a 2-day workshop at Sitka Center for Art & Ecology and kicked off our studio incubator relationship with the c3:initiative with an Open House. In other words this has been the summer of throwing ourselves into promoting the studio instead of camping, cleaning, or working in our yard- in the hopes that we can build our community and keep the momentum going into the rainy days ahead. Now that Jenn is self employed at the studio this momentum is more important than ever.

While the street fair circuit brought us a huge audience, it didn't bring us much $$. We chalk it up to unusually warm temperatures, and and overabundance of merchandise choices. In the future we'll likely focus on vending at curated indoor markets and getting our retail goods into local businesses via wholesale orders. Next summer we'd like to do more demos at farms, museums, and public spaces. Ideally we would collect plants and fibers from said locations and have a mobile paper mill to make paper on site. We'd blog about the demos along the way and build a paper recipe database on our soon to be built papermaking wiki website. Then all we'd need is a faster, more portable beater- want to help us get one? 

One of our goals as we head into the fall is to continue to build relationships with businesses, artists and makers. We've had some great custom order opportunities, soon we'll start working with artists in our new combined studio residency program with the c3:initiative in Sept., our open call handmade paper postcard exhibition opens on Sept. 5, and in mid-Sept. we're making space and earth paper at the OMSI Mini-Maker Faire. 

There's been little time to catch our breaths and take in the beauty of summer in Oregon so we too are going to try and squeeze in some summer fun over the coming weeks. Next weekend we'll head out to a group papermaking retreat with the Western Gathering of Papermakers on Whidbey Island. We've never been to the retreat before, or to the island, and will be doing some camping on the host's property. Needless to say, we're super excited to meet some fellow papermakers and get out into the wilderness. 

As we wrap up this post we have a few requests. If you haven't signed up for our e-newsletter and want to keep up to date with our events, classes and projects- please go sign-up! And if you've been thinking about reaching out to us about a custom order, private group class, or even a project that you'd like to explore- send us an email. We want the studio to be a community resource for folks both in our local community, and our global community. Thanks for your support and here's to the last rays of summer!