Last Thursday marked a big occasion for our studio- it was Jenn's last day at her day job! After 5 years as the HR & Office Coordinator for the non-profit classical radio station in Portland, it was time to move on. Here are some of Jenn's thoughts on the transition. This is going to be pretty long, so if you're looking for something breezy and succinct, this isn't the post for you. In a sea of inspirational internet blogs about quitting your day job, I don't have all the answers. All I can offer is some insight into how I got to this place, and maybe that will help someone else feel a little less alone in their struggles. Or maybe it will help you understand why our paper studio is bigger than a small business, it's huge to us. It's a radically different way of life. It's a choice to move towards investing in our hopes and dreams and to have the privilege to share them with others.
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At the end of the year it seems everyone is taking stock of the past 12 months and thinking about what tomorrow will bring. More of the same? Something fresh? Likely a mix of both. We'll jump into the melee and share our recap of the year and what we are looking forward to in 2014. 2013 was the first full year of Pulp & Deckle being in existence. We honed our teaching skills, took a 5 week small business workshop via the PSU Business Outreach Program, particpated in 2 farmer's markets and 3 days of Art in the Pearl (doing demos), were vendors at the St. Johns Bizarre, competed in the Martha Stewart American Made Awards, were interviewed for a video currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Craft, participated in Little Boxes, and hosted several open house/demo. events at the studio. It seems fitting that as the calendar year turns over we are pulping away at the studio, working on a custom order of 820 papers for a unique book project (more on that soon!). It's been a year of victories, firsts, failures and many, many learning opportunities. While we're not quite as far along as we had hoped we'd be in terms of being employed full-time by ourselves (we both still have day jobs to pay the bills), we do recognize what we've accomplished. We're still volunteering our time at the studio, and unfortunately did not qualify for a small business loan, but we're not going to let that keep us from charging ahead. A few things that we're looking forward to in 2014 are giving a talk/demo./family activity at the Museum of the Oregon Territory in Feb., and teaching a watermarks workshop at Sitka Center for Art and Ecology in July. We're also excited to formally launch our line of custom wedding goods (designs coming in late Jan.) As we look to the new year, we're honing our business plan to identify the kinds of partnerships and programs we'd like to develop. Our studio is dedicated to the creation, promotion and preservation of the handmade papermaking process. As such we'd like to put more of an emphasis on developing community engagement projects that connect people with handmade paper in a meaningful way. We've got an idea cooking for a Valentine's Day related project (details coming soon!), and are also looking at ways we can have drop-in workshop nights. We'd love to do more demo. gigs, and teach workshops (and take workshops!) around the globe (so get in touch if you have a collaboration you'd like to do with us). And we will be placing an emphasis on creating papers from locally harvested plants like iris leaves, sitka spruce bark, gladiola stalks, cattails, and crocosmia, just to name a few. There's a lot of room to grow and learn and we welcome the new year with open arms! Happy New Year! See you on the other side. This past week we said goodbye to our longtime animal companion, Mojo. He was a 13.5 yr. old attention loving lap cat who battled what we believe was a type of lymphoma/cancer with his characteristic stubbornness. We loved Mojo with full and open hearts, and are so grateful to have spent many purr filled years with him. Mojo was adopted from an animal rescue organization in upstate NY. To honor his memory we will donate 10% of our retail sales profits from now until the end of the year to a wonderful Portland non-profit animal adoption and rescue group, the Pixie Project. We frequently drive past their glass fronted location and always keep an eye out for cats in their "cattery" adoption room. We love seeing their snoozing faces, and we often travel that way just to spy how many cats we can spot. It never fails to make us smile. Over the next few weeks and months we'll be adding many new seasonal items to our online store, and look forward to giving the Pixie Project a nice, big donation check to start off 2013. Give your furry loved ones a few extra pets for us! Their time with us is a gift. marbled papers recycled papers seed papers vegetable and fruit papyrus beer paper cotton rag paper bamboo paper papers made with wedding flowers eastern style papers (mulberry, banana) mobiles seed paper confetti invitations bookmarks stationery custom postcards for local businesses menus coasters party backdrops nightlights journals masks ornaments banners thrown pulp sculptures posters buttons sewn items typed on items drawings prints Maybe it's the deluge of social media posts discussing where people were on this fateful day what seems like another lifetime ago, or maybe it's the (supposed) change of season, or maybe it's that one of our cats was diagnosed with cancer, but I've found myself thinking big thoughts lately, like "where do I want to be in 5 years" and "if money were no object what would I do". For so many reasons life has been nudging my husband and I towards making big, potentially life altering choices and so I find myself in a reflective frame of mind. This Friday is the one year anniversary of the successful completion of our Kickstarter fundraising campaign. That means it's officially been a year since the studio became a really-real thing. That moment of triumph has carried us through continued uncertainty and lots of growing pains. Now we are on the threshold of trying to transition from the somewhat predictable safety net of our day jobs to having at least one of us work full-time at the studio. Though it's not our preference, it looks like we'll need to get an operating loan to make this possible. For me, taking on additional debt is a huge and risky thing, as I have a mountain of student loan debt from undergrad and grad school, and have been mostly working at non-profits since graduating (i.e., not exactly mega-money coming in). But sometimes you have to take a deep breath and just hope that when you come up for air, you'll find it. One of the workshops we enjoy offering is paper marbling. The art of marbling paper is the process of dripping various colors of ink or thinned paint onto a liquid surface. The earliest type of marbling started in 12th century Japan and is called Suminagashi, which means "spilled ink." India, Persia, and Turkey began using marbling techniques in their decorative arts in the 15th century. It wasn't until the 17th century that European artists began to marble. In our marbling workshop we like to focus on two very different techniques. We start with a process involving shaving cream, food coloring, and our 100% post-consumer waste recycled papers. This is a really messy and fun way to marble that you can learn to do at home (if you dare!) Once we have everyone smelling thoroughly like a barber shop, we move on to Suminagashi. We use bottled inks to drop colors onto a water and methocel mixture, creating patterns that we carefully transfer onto our handmade cotton rag papers. At the conclusion of the class students end up with a totally unique, one-of-a-kind mix of marbled papers that they can use to make cards, art, books, etc. In addition to our regularly scheduled marbling classes, we'd love to teach some private group, or individual marbling workshops. Drop us a line at our email to discuss the possibilities. The gallery below features photos from our last round of paper marbling. Enjoy! A couple of weekends back we went to Arch Cape, OR for the weekend to celebrate Jenn's birthday. While there we decided to collect seaweed on the beach (good thing we brought our rain boots!) The weather was pretty stormy and we had a limited window of opportunity for scavenging, but we estimate that we collected about .5 lbs of wet material. As we couldn't get to the studio right away, we stored the seaweed in a lidded container with water in our basement. Once we were ready to bring it over to the studio we rinsed it off, and put in a large pot with a bit of soda ash to cook for about 2 hours. We checked about every 30 mins. to see how the plant was when we gently tried to pull it apart, and once it started pulling without resistance we figured it was done and ready to be rinsed. When disposing of the water that the plants were cooked in, we made sure to add in some vinegar to neutralize the toxicity of the water/soda ash before disposal. Here we are rinsing the seaweed with water and vinegar, and collecting it in our large strainer. After straining the seaweed we decided to try putting it in our "critter" beater for about 1.5 hours. While there were some stubborn ribbon-y clumps, most of the material broke down well into semi-short fibers. We might have been able to beat the material a little longer to get the fibers to be less clumpy. Next time! As this was our first time making seaweed paper we weren't really sure about the quality of the plants we collected. In hindsight I think it would be best to collect longer strands that are more grass-like. Much of our seaweed had nodules, and heck, maybe isn't even seaweed but some other ocean plant life. In the future we will also collect more material. We had to couch 2-3 layers of fibers to make a solid sheet without holes. Once the seaweed was dried for about 48 hours in our restraint drying box, we discovered it really did not want to release itself from our cotton blotters. We decided that rather than trying to peel off the super thin sheets, we'll leave them on the blotters and make some art of them. Printmaking anyone? So yes, in the future we'll be doing some things differently with our seaweed papers. Hopefully we'll end up with a more successful end product next time around. Anyone out there got any tips for us? We'd love to hear them! Read all about our latest adventures in pulp, hear how our Grand Opening went, and more, in our Feb. e-newsletter! Also we're working on some exciting news for March that's top secret, stay tuned! ...a papermaking studio! Since our last post we've made some progress, and still have a last minute home stretch to get the studio up and running at full capacity. Our Mark Lander Hollander "Critter" Beater arrived- and she's a beaut! After getting an electrically savvy friend to help us wire up the motor (many thanks Alex!), and us wheeling the whole thing over to a local auto parts store to get the perfect fitting belt (the auto parts salesman was confused but amused), we fired up the Critter this past week with great success! Below is a video of our first batch of pulp in the Critter. We beat cardboard and recycled paper junkmail for about 6 hours. The photo of Jenn below shows the first sheets of paper from the batch as it's air drying. Due to its thickness, and our current lack of a press, it's taking a few days for the papers to dry. We'll be making these papers into postcards for some of our Kickstarter backers. These will become postcards That brings us to this coming Fri. when our 12-ton Aardvark Press will arrive from Carriage House Paper in Brooklyn, NY, along with some highly anticipated supplies like pulp pigments, pulp fibers (kozo and bamboo!), formation aid, etc. Once the press is here it will greatly assist in our ability to produce larger, more consistent runs of papers. We're also anticipating the arrival of blotters and double walled cardboard sheets for the restraint drying box we built last weekend. With the beater, press, and drying box in place, we'll be papering up a storm! Another view of the studio set-up in progress. On Sat. Dec. 1st we'll hold our first workshop. We're super excited (and a little nervous honestly), for our Papermaking for Kids! class. We have 1 student registered so far, and would love to have some others join in on the fun. So if you know any kids aged 6-10 that like to get crafty and messy, send them our way. Click here for more info. on upcoming workshops and to sign-up. Also, look what we picked up this past week- our TEAM PAPER shirts for Kickstarter backers! They look so great, and it was a great experience working with the local screenprinting company, Little Red Press. We'll be sending out the shirts in the coming weeks as we package them up with other rewards, like buttons and postcards. For those Kickstarter backers that chose seed papers as rewards, our production schedule is a little backed up and we will likely not be mailing them out until Jan. 2013. If you were hoping to have your seed papers to give as gifts during Dec. please shoot us an email at studio@pulpanddeckle.com so we can put a rush on your order. Thanks for everyone's understanding and patience, and our apologies for the delay! Making 285 sheets of seed paper of various colors with varied seeds, takes a bit of time. And for anyone wondering about the glue we found on the floor of the studio after taking up the carpet, after doing some experimenting and cleaning, it looks like over time the glue will take care of itself because it is water soluble. As the floor of the studio gets wet while we're working, we can squeegee the glue up bit by bit. We'll also be using anti-fatigue mats in areas where we and our students are working, and this should keep things comfortable for everyone. If you want to stay up to date on our latest classes, events, products, and when we'll have our Grand Opening Party (date TBD), sign-up for our monthly "Paper Free Paper Notes" email newsletter. That about brings us up to date! Here's a link to our most recent press release that we'd love for you to share far and wide so we can get the word out about our workshops. After we wrap up production of our kickstarter rewards we'll start working on products for our online retail store. Any special requests?
P.S.- the paper lamb we worked on in our last post was a bust. I think we missed a couple of important steps in the process to keep the paper in a solid shape. We'll play around some more with sculptural projects like this and report back! It's been just over a month since we successfully reached our Kickstarter goal, and we've been hammering away at our to-do list to get the studio up and running. We're happy to report that we now have our very own 1-inch button maker, and have been merrily making TEAM PAPER buttons for our kickstarter backers. We can't wait to play around with making buttons with some handmade paper, and we will be sure to put them up in our online store (coming soon!) Our timeline for opening has been pushed back by a few weeks while we wait for equipment and supplies to arrive. If you follow us on Facebook then you probably saw that we placed an order for a custom made Mark Lander Hollander Critter Beater. Mark is a really nice guy and we're happy to be working with him, but he does live in New Zealand, and he is a small shop, so the turn around time for our order is a little longer than we anticipated. We're happy to wait so that we can get the best, most affordable beater we can get, and can't wait to crank that baby up and start making some cotton rag paper! Another major piece of equipment that we're waiting on is our Aardvark 12-Ton press, which we're purchasing from Carriage House Paper, based out of Brooklyn, NY. Once the press is ready it'll be shipped by truck out to us, hopefully in the coming weeks. We'll keep you posted! Originally we planned on ordering a Reina Paper Drying Box from Carriage House Paper. After crunching the numbers it makes more sense for us to build our own custom restraint drying box system. We've already got the basic plans for creating a drying box and are going to save thousands of dollars that we can put towards supplies and our studio garden. We can't wait to get the garden going, and to experiment with making pulp from local plants. We're even thinking about growing our own Paper Mulberry trees in pots, to harvest the bark shoots for making Kozo paper. So if you've been waiting for news from us and wondering when we'll be open for business, the answer is a hopeful- soon! In all likelihood we'll start having workshops in November, and would like to have a grand opening party coinciding with the St. Johns Last Friday art walk on Nov. 30th. We hope to have our workshop schedule posted by Oct. 22nd, so students can register with at least a weeks notice. Until then, if you have any questions about our workshops let us know. For now, we leave you with our latest experiment with recycled pulp- a paper lamb! A few weeks back we made some dark blue recycled paper pulp with embedded flower seeds. We had some leftover pulp that we strained almost all the water out of and stuck in our refrigerator at home. After many days of thinking- we really should do something with that pulp- we finally did. As the pulp is pretty moist and it is air drying in the candy molds, it will likely take more than a week to dry. We'll be sure to post pics. when it's removed from the mold. Fingers crossed that it looks like a lovely little blue lamb! |
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