Bookbinding is a good winter activity when its too cold to put your hands in the vat. I’m rather pleased with the outcome - a couple of notebooks for work, made using my own paper
Paper made for bookbinding
The latest batch of cotton linters from Carriage house paper has produces a lovely, uniform sheet with a crisp watermark - happy papermaker!
Visiting papermakers
A great day of nerding out on papermaking with two of North America’s most innovative paper brains, Lee McDonald and Brian Queen. I’m particularly grateful to Brian who very kindly gave me a signed copy of Tim Barrett’s new book. http://www.thelegacypress.com/barrett-papermaking.html
Tub Sizing
When it’s too cold for papermaking, there’s always the option for dunking your hands in a warm gelatin solution…
Gelatin size produces the perfect surface for watercolour paper, it also gives the paper a lovely rattle
I soak the sheets in the size (3.5% rabbit skin glue gelatin solution with a pinch of alum added) and then meter the size off through a nip roller. The metering rollers are just a crude mangle and the sizing tub itself sits in a kind of ‘bain marie’ to keep the size solution warm. The bain marie is just a kids’s paddling pool filled with warm water which is circulated through a tea urn - this keeps the contents of the size tub at around 40 degrees C. All very ‘Heath Robinson’ but it works!
the sheets are then hung for the gelatin to set a little ( I wait until the sheen disappears)
Then I dry the sheets through a cylinder dryer. This is a photographic, electrically heated drum dryer. I’ve found that I can’t dry the sheets directly against the drum as this quickly becomes covered in gelatin, so I put a sheet of pellon in between the paper and the drum.
Finally, the paper goes into the dry press to fully flatten it down again.
A summer of papermaking
It was a busy 2018 with many visitors, most of whom came and made paper.
Now that the cold has set in and the last making of the year (Christmas cards) is complete, the mill has been put to bed for the winter
Visitors to the paper mill
We always enjoy visits from our friends, especially when they come and make paper
