golly was I ever crafty today
So after excavating a big pile of 'urbanite' in my backyard, Spike and I made our first-ever batch of homemade paper, inspired by instructions someone posted on naturalliving. We used shredded pay stubs as our base, augmented with some salmon-colored paper from the recycling box. Mixed everything up in the old, pre-'Magic Bullet' blender I was planning to donate to a church yard sale. It is now our dedicated paper making blender.
It took us a while to get something at least approaching the right consistency of paper pulp, and at one point the bottom portion of the blender came off, flooding the countertop with paper mush. (I never have that problem with the Magic Bullet!) Early on in the process I added some scraps of orange and hot pink construction paper to tint the fairly unattractive grey pulp.
The results were less than stellar, but definitely something we'll try again. Got a bunch of too-thick, funky textured paper rectangles in a nice pale pink color which I think we'll trim down to make gift tags, or maybe calling cards. I also made heart-shaped gift tags by filling a cookie cutter set on top of the screen with the paper pulp. After it dried a bit I could turn out a perfect heart shape.
The jury-rigged screen we were using did not work well at all--I think a better frame will solve most of our problems. Spike's younger sister suggested we try a finer mesh screen, too. We were using window screening, which did leave an interesting texture on one side of the paper. Amber suggested we use one leg of an old pair of panty hose... She cracked us up by trying to make 'panty hose' singular. 'You ought to use a panty ho,' she told us.
If nothing else I foresee us making lots of homemade Christmas gift tags this year!