Making recycled paper: Keep being green fun for best results!

This weekend was learning time for my 14-year-old daughter – and, surprisingly, me, too!

I got some books from the library a couple of week ago to see what was available to kids on the subject of environmentalism. Among the books was one called, “Earth-Friendly Crafts for Kids: 50 Awesome Things to Make with Recycled Stuff,” by Heather Smith, with Joe Rhatigan.

One of the crafts showed kids how to make handmade paper out of old paper scraps. Looking at the list of necessary items, I notice that we didn’t have some of the stuff.




What we didn’t have:

A deckle and mold, which is a metal screen on a frame and another frame on top of that
A plastic pan, about the size of a kitty litter box
Pieces of felt, for drawing water out of the fresh paper

What we did have:

Blender
Junk mail, old notes, scraps of construction paper, et cetera
Water
Something heavy, like phone books
A surprise tool (see below!)

Now, being a poor student (poor, not as in pathetic, but as in short of cash on a regular basis), I had to get creative about what we didn’t have.

For a deckle and mold, we used a cheap ($3) wooden frame and a $1.29 piece of metal mesh from the hardware store across the street. I cut the metal mesh down to the size of the glass from the frame and simply slipped it in, setting the glass aside, then folding down the metal tabs to keep it seated.
For the cat pan, we used a plastic underbed box instead, cleared of the toys that usually inhabit it.

For the felt, we used old cloth diapers that had been wrapped around my baby’s butt before she learned to go potty (cloth diapers are absolutely fabulous for the environment – plastic diapers just fill up the dump – and are great to use for a variety of projects later on).

After reading the instructions, my daughter, Melinda, and I looked at each other and sighed. Tearing all that paper into little bits sounded like paper cuts waiting to happen. Suddenly, Melinda’s eyes lit up. She pointed to our shredder (surprise tool!) and said, “We already have cut-up paper!”

Smart girl.

So, we proceeded to the blender, filling it two-thirds of the way with paper and almost to the top with water, and blending it until it was a pulp the consistency of a milk shake (though not one you’d think of drinking).

Melinda did up three pitchers of pulp and poured them into the underbed box, then added more water to make a sort of paper soup (again, not the eating kind!).

She then dipped the homemade mold into the soup and moved it around a bit as she brought it to the surface and finally pulled it up, level, out of the box. She let it drain for a while, pressing with a sponge (which had to be wrung out a few times into the box), until most of the water was gone.



All photos by Jennifer Tramm, excepting videos, below.



She then brought it over to a flat surface and gently flipped the paper in the mold over onto a waiting cloth diaper. Before trying to remove the paper, she pressed the back of the mold with another diaper. With more water out of the paper, she then gently pressed with her fingers to encourage the paper to release from the mold.

Once free of the mesh, we decided to press it down with the glass from the picture frame (makes one side of the paper smooth, for writing or drawing). I put the glass over the paper and gently flipped it, the paper and the diaper until the glass was down. I then pressed a bit more with the diaper to get out more moisture and to straighten wrinkles and left it to dry.

We did it again later, but had a bit of a hitch: Melinda hadn’t checked the shreds for bits of plastic from old credit cards. It wasn’t until after we made the second sheet of paper and after it had been pressed onto the glass that I noticed two bits of plastic in our now-pretty sheet of paper.

Oh, well. It gives it extra texture, right?

I looked online for some other resources on papermaking and came up with a great site, a photo set on Flickr.com, that had more than 40 photos of the paper making process that put mine to shame.

I found another site from the Wisconsin Paper Council that makes it really simple and pumps up the learning when making paper.

I also found this YouTube.com video that shows a mom and daughter making paper. The mom talks a lot and the kid looks like she was coached, but it’s a pretty good example of how it’s done.



Here’s another one, in which a fourth grade class is shown how to make paper, with embellishments, by their teacher. Kind of a neat twist on the project!



This project was a bit messy, but it was fun and both my daughter and me learned how easy it really is to make paper out of all of that mailbox junk and old used-once notepaper.

Possible pluses from a mom’s perspective (other than the obvious saving of the planet!): Grandparents love, love, love stuff their grandkids make and a personalized something, like a handmade card, makes a great present that’s inexpensive and keeps the kids happy at the same time! I could see this evolving into other projects, such as molding the paper pulp into shapes and then painting them. Or even applying the pulp, with embellishments, to plain vases.

In the end, it’s all fun and a great learning opportunity that’ll help keep kids in an environmentally responsible mindset as they grow older.