Hand Papermaking with Daylily

I can’t believe I have been throwing all my daylily and iris clippings in the compost bin! You can make paper out of them! Not only those but okra stems and milkweed stems and corn husks–and that’s only the beginning. I am going to have to start asking people to save their garden clippings for me because I want to make paper out of it. And the gooey part of okra pods can be used as a formation aid (a way to make paper pulp a good consistency for paper sheet formation).

I am a beginner, so do your own reading and research before taking on papermaking of your own. Here is an account of my beginning foray into this craft.

After taking a good look around my garden, I found a respectable quantity of dried daylily leaves and put them in a bucket for an overnight soak. They floated, so I weighted them down with a brick.

After seeing this photo of bundles of bamboo weighted with stones in The Art and Craft of Papermaking by Sophie Dawson, I realized I wasn’t the first person to meet with this problem or arrive at this solution.

Next day, I poured out the soak water which had turned a deep reddish-brown color and rinsed the leaves in several changes of fresh water. Here are the leaves after their soak:

I brought a cutting board and a knife outside and chopped the leaves up into pieces about 3/4 to 1 1/2 inches in length. I separated them into small twisted bundles and started cutting. It took about 20 minutes. Here it is all chopped up:

The next step is to cook it in a solution of sodium carbonate (also known as soda ash) and water. This is to purify the plant material, releasing the parts of it not wanted for papermaking. I used Arm & Hammer Washing Soda. Using the measure of 1/2 oz. of soda ash per quart of water (I weighed it and one tablespoon equals 1/2 oz.) I brought the solution to a boil and then added the leaves. It does smell a bit, but it is not horrible.

After two hours, stirring periodically, I let the brew cool and poured off the water. Once again the water had darkened, only much more so than during their overnight cool-water soak. The liquid was the color of espresso.

Using the bucket, I rinsed the plant matter and poured it off into a large piece of screen which I pressed into a sort of bowl shape.

I did this ten times before the water finally ran tolerably clear, the color of chamomile tea. The chopped leaves were considerably lighter in color than they were before rinsing. The next step was to beat the fibers to a pulp. I fashioned a beating stick after another photo in The Art and Craft of Papermaking, of a Japanese beating stick. Mine has a shorter handle because my scrap of lumber was shorter.

I beat a small sample of the fibers just to do a test.

I had not built my mould and deckle at this point, so I formed a test sheet on a little scrap of window screen using paper towels as couching felts. I was pleasantly surprised that I actually made paper! Here it is, pure daylily paper after drying and a quick press with the iron:

It is surprisingly strong and flexible. I will post soon about making a mould and deckle and my first real sheets of paper.

There is a lifetime’s worth of learning to be done on this subject if one is so inclined. Here’s a good place to start: www.handpapermaking.org/beginner/index.htm

A good beginner’s book is the aforementioned The Art and Craft of Papermaking, by Sophie Dawson. Another one with some interesting and beautiful ideas, including many recipes using plant material from your backyard is 300 Papermaking Recipes by Mary Reimer and Heidi Reimer-Epp.

The above web address is the site of the magazine, Hand Papermaking, and it contains a collection of articles for the beginning papermaker, including Finding Plant Fibers and Paper from Iris and Daylily,

Another site, http://www.pioneerthinking.com/makingpaper.html contains the article, Making Handmade Paper in 10 Easy Steps, which gives an overview of basic papermaking procedures.