Fluffbuff

  We made paper!

Okay, step back. Today was the first meeting of a new LA guild: the Los Angeles Fiber Guild, a.k.a. LAF. Appropriate name for a guild starting off on April 1, no?

The guild had been in the making for a few months, thanks primarily to the work of Janel, Una, and Theresa. LAF is a new kind of guild because it's an interdisciplinary guild for all things fiber and our first workshop today was about papermaking. Future workshops will include silk ribbon embroidery, basket weaving, felting, knotless netting and more.

We started the meeting with some catching up (all of us who showed up today are friends from GLASG, the local spinning guild) and a short show-and-tell.

Theresa brought her short-row blanket which got first prize at Visalia's Conference in the knitted accessories category. Somehow I like everything Theresa makes. Last time she was at my house she was knitting the short-row scarf that I fell in love with and had to make right away. I have a feeling this blanket will join the list of future knitting projects chez Fluffbuff. Isn't it gorgeous?

Elena had the socks she spun and knitted following a pattern designed by Janel and which also placed first at Visalia's.

The meeting took place at a school in downtown LA in a room that the kids use for gym, lunch and other activities. The school has an art focus and the room has a lot of cool artwork.

A giant US map on the floor…

and a clear Warhol thing going, from the Campbell tomato soup cans…

to the portrait treatments we are all familiar with.

We started our papermaking workshop by shredding our junk mail. I had just gotten rid of all my recycling stuff but had plenty of business printouts destined to the shredder that worked out beautifully.

The paper got shredded, soaked and fed to the blender. Some of us added pieces of colored tissue paper to the slurry to colorize it. I decided to keep mine as it was to see exactly how the laser printed sheets would turn out. Since I always have loads of those, I would love to find a good use for the stuff.

Pour the slurry in the deckle-and-screen mold.

Add pieces of paper, flowers and anything else you want to use as an inclusion.

Let stand for a minute or so and remove the deckle (the frame part). Put a screen over the wet paper, a towel over the screen, and roll out as much water as possible.

Set out to dry.

We had to weigh down our sheets because they kept folding and flying away.

Back home; my paper is almost dry.

Before and after: from laser printouts to handmade paper. As Janel told us: you need a sheet of paper to make a sheet of paper.

The ink formed specks in the paper that remind me of vanilla ice-cream.

During my undergraduate years, I bought a papermaking frameset that I actually never got to use. I am going to dig it out and run some tests soon.