Blue Moon, Blue Paper

Last night we celebrated the Blue Moon by making some blue paper during the St. Johns Last Friday Artwalk. We had a fun and FREE public event from 5-7pm, where people stopped in and helped us make a huge 4x4 foot piece of produce papyrus, we demoed making paper from recycled papers (like junkmail, scrap paper, etc.), and had a mini-gallery of artwork that Jenn has made in the past using cotton papers, Asian papers, watermarked paper, and marbleized paper (pics of the artwork to come!)

We even had some brave and curious folks step up and make their own blue plantable seed paper. Even though making recycled paper is a pretty low-frills process, there's still something magical about pulling up your mould from the vat and seeing the pulp resting there, waiting to become paper. 

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There were a lot of questions about the produce papyrus process, and hopefully everyone felt more informed after their visit! A few things we've learned that are essential to the success of produce papyrus are- 

1. Cook or soak your fruits & veggies so that they are pliable and moist.
   
2. Pressure is needed either from a press, or clamps, or weights. In our case we used ourselves, & our truck to drive onto the papyrus once it was sandwiched between plywood, cardboard, and cotton sheets. Since we couldn't park there overnight we placed heavy paving stones on top to keep pressure on. 
   
3. Keep things as dry as possible after you've applied pressure. We'll be checking on our piece everyday, and as needed we will change out the cardboard and sheets to keep the produce from getting moldy. 
   
4. Watch out for ants! If you leave this kind of project outside, you'll probably attract ants who will try to participate in your papermaking. We learned this the hard way last week when we foolishly left some smaller pieces of produce papyrus outside. 
   
5. Don't be afraid to experiment! If you're not sure what kinds of vegetables will work, just give it a whirl. The worst thing that will happen is that it won't work out and will end up in the compost pile. The best thing is you could make a beautiful piece of art that might surprise you!

Placing a sheet over the finished produce papyrus

Thanks so much to everyone who came by last night! We so appreciate your support and hope to be seeing you at the studio again in the future! You can view all the photos from the event over on our Facebook page. Please spread the word about what you learned, and hopefully you'll tell others that we'll be an asset to the local community. 

You can also support us by donating to our kickstarter campaign to raise money for studio equipment. As you saw last night, there's so many more things we'll be able to do once we have the right equipment. We're especially excited to start making cotton papers from old clothes, as well as making pulp from plants in our own garden. 

We're almost halfway to our goal and we need your help to put things over the top! If we don't reach our goal we won't get any of the pledged money, and will have to start our fundraising over from scratch. Let's keep the momentum going and make it happen the first time around. 

GO TEAM PAPER! 

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