Making Paper from Vegetables
Sunday, 1 July 2007 - 22:06
I moved house, and my new flatmates were away. There was only one thing for it: to make paper from vegetables. It was surprisingly hard to find instructions for the process on this, and there doesn't seem to be any books on the subject anywhere in Scotland. Pretty much everything you find online just explains how to recycle old newspapers, and doesn't shed any light on how paper is made in the first place. With good local greengrocers, I set out to explore.
Ingredients came first and having no great idea about what would most suitable I bought ten leeks. They seemed like they should be quite fibrous since they are largely inedible, and frankly, I like them. Ten of these noble plants accompanied me home, ready to set forth boldly into the unknown.
Whatever you plan on using, give it a good wash and cut it into strips a couple of centimetres wide. I reckoned it was better to cut these leeks lengthways since that's the way the fibres seemed to run. Long molecular chains are responsible for the strength of plastic carrier bags and it seemed a good model to follow. Snapping a stem in two seemed to confirm that I wasn't talking complete rubbish.
Job done, leave your plant material to soak in cold water for as long as possible and as least overnight: this will soften it up.
This is a good opportunity to sort out the equipment you'll need. My leeks ended up soaking for three days while I kept finding there were more things to lay my hands on and films worth seeing at the cinema. Essential items are a bucket, some sort of vat, a big sieve, blotter paper and a mould and deckle. The bucket should be big enough to contain your plant material and then a bit more for luck. A mould and deckle are basically just two wooden frames of the same size; the only difference is that the mould has a fine wire mesh stretched across it and the deckle doesn't. It's easy enough to make a set from cheap pine about two centimetres wide and thick, which is what I did. Work out the size you want your paper, cut the wood to the right size and get busy with a staple gun to hold it together. Make sure you give it a couple of thick coats of varnish since they'll spend plenty of time submerged. As you might have cottoned onto by now, the vat needs to be big enough that you can comfortably hold the mould and deckle in it. I aimed to make a B5-sized mould and deckle, though it ended up a little smaller than that; an IKEA storage box served perfectly as a vat.
If that's all sorted, it's time for the real alchemy to begin. Plonk your plants into the bucket and cover with water. Put your rubber gloves on and add some caustic soda to the water. I wasn't terribly precise about this, adding a fair amount but stopping before I thought I'd gone too far, and stir it about with some sort of long-handled utensil that you don't really want to use with food again. Now boil that bastard for about three hours!
Here comes the science: plants contain two sorts of fibrous materials, lignin and cellulose. Cellulose is good: it is tough and is the main ingredient in paper. Lignin reacts to light and if there's any in your paper, it will curl up and go brown before long. The caustic soda turns the water in the bucket alkaline, and this dissolves away the nasty old lignin. If you've ever notice old newspapers go weird when they're left in the sun, that's because of how they're produced. They don't need to last long, so pulp for them is made by mechanically crushing wood, making use of about ninety five percent of the material including all the lignin. But we want rid of it, and when it's ready, the bucket will be full of nasty black gunk.
When it's ready, pour it through the sieve and into the sink. Thinking that it might be a bad idea to pour caustic soda down straight into the pipes, I put the plug in and diluted it rather a lot first. You'll be amazed how much of the vegetables has dissolved away and how little pulp you're left with at the end.
Make sure you thoroughly rinse the pulp and then give it a whizz in the blender. Transfer the pulp to the vat, and pour in at least enough water to cover the height of the mould and deckle. Obviously, the more water you add, the more dilute the pulp will be and the thinner the paper. Stick your hands in and shake them about to make sure the pulp gets going and fills the vat.
Now comes the actual paper making! Hold the mould with the wire mesh facing up, and sit the deckle on top. Keep a firm grip on these and lower vertically into the back of the vat. Bring them forward until they're horizontal under the water line and pull them up. Excess water will filter down through the mesh, and gingerly shake the mould and deckle from side to side to help the fibres get mixed up. When pretty much all the water has drained through, put the mould on the table and remove the deckle. You should have a sheet of wet fibres sat on top of the mesh, ready to become a sheet of paper once it dries. But you don't want it on there, so dip some blotter paper in water until it's completely saturated. You're going to press or "couch" the sheet onto there; the surface tension of the water in the blotter is greater than the force holding the sheet onto the mesh, so the sheet is pulled down onto the blotter.
Turn the mould upside down and in one smooth motion press one side onto the blotter and roll the mould across. If it works, the mould will lift clean away leaving the whole sheet behind. Leave the new sheet of paper to dry and repeat the process for as long as you have a reasonable amount of pulp left in the vat.
When it's completely dry, you'll be able to carefully peel the paper from the blotter. After all that work, those ten leeks furnished me with seven and a half sheets of delicate, thin paper. If nothing else, it's a great space saver since these don't take up half as much room as those leeks did. It's rather nice, quite like tracing paper, and perhaps a bit too fragile to really be used. But these were to serve as a prototype, and I've now got a better grip on the process. I didn't know all that stuff about lignin and can now see that leeks aren't the best plant to use since they aren't particularly high in cellulose. And I've now got a clue about the quantities of pulp to use and can see that I had rather a lot of water in the vat when I scooped out these pages. Plenty of opportunities remain to make more in future.
Rebecca in sunny California commented:
My art professor, that is teaching us paper making right now, has a book that shows slicing vegetables very thinly and then ironing them or drying them out somehow. The pictures show them using carrots and cucumber. I'll have to get a closer look at the book. I'll leave more info later if I can.
Anonymous commented:
you're brilliant!!!! good job....
philbe from malaysia commented:
i'm interested rebecca's comment...
can u please let me know about the method...
Anonymous commented:
hha
Thursday, 5 July 2007 - 02:42