Botanical handmade papers!

These are the papers I finished off by the end of the day!! These have botanical additions (grass, flower petals and herbal teas) as well as cardstock confetti.

The yellow batch has orange day lily flowers in it. They were dry so I soaked them, blended them well and added them to the slurry!! A bit of grass and some herbal tea for interest and I was good to go.

I did incorporate a few "ends of batches" into these paper as well. It is always fun to see what you get when you mix colours and batches.

These will do well in my card making in the spring when I am looking for colour!

Therese

Embossed handmade paper

I had a pail full of turquoise paper pulp and had just finished making glittery snow falling paper so I thought I would see what I could do to make some embossed paper!!

I hand stitched a bunch of fun foam snowflakes to a handiwipe using fine clear plastic thread, wet it and laid it on my couching surface. I used my mould and deckle to form a large sheet of handmade paper and couched it right over top of my new snowflake embossing surface. It worked very well!!

The snowflakes did not stick to the handmade paper so it easily lifted off the surface leaving beautiful embossed snowflakes in the paper!! Once the paper is dry, the embossed design is permanently part of the paper. I have a stack of these light turquoise papers which will be great for making Christmas cards!!!

I am imagining the possibilities for creating embossing surfaces using other types of materials, die cuts, etc!! I can see that there are more embossed handmade papers in my future!!

Therese

More handmade paper!!

More handmade paper!! It has been hot so it has been good for drying it!! I made these sheets with Christmas cards in mind! The first photo is a close up of the surface of the paper along with a sample of the kind of gift wrap I used to get the sparkles in my paper! On a whim, last year, I cut up and blended some of this glittery prisamatic paper in hopes of getting some silvery accents in my paper and to my surprise I got a clear glitter instead!! The paper looks like glistening snow!!

You can see in this photo that I made four colours of this snow paper - lilac, aqua, pink and blue!! If you take a closer look (click on the photo) you will also see that I have added white paper confetti to these papers to really make them look like there is snow falling!!

So I will be creating a Christmas card for one of my stack classes this fall using this paper!! I am loving the look!!!

So I will be saving any of this paper that shows up on presents at Christmas this year!! If you are a papermaker consider giving this a try - I know you will love the results. The base pulp for these handmade paper sheets is cardstock and white bond which gave me some nice pastel colours. Check my previous post or click here to see what the colours look like full strength.

Therese