Learn to Make Paper at Home

This paper is not great. I’m trying to improve the quality.

July 30, 2025

Warning:  there are un-beeped curse words.  Actually, if you have no interest in making paper, stop reading.  Now.  I mean it.  Now.  Good. 

Here’s my (lack of) progress report on paper-making.  

Review:  Ash Wednesday, 2025, I vowed to make handmade paper to print a poem.  Printers call sheets with poems broadsides.  I vowed to create a broadside in 2025.  I had a favorite poem, an introduction to a book, really, by our family friend and widely known literary critic, Leslie Fiedler.

The equipment and materials for paper making are mostly to be found in my house.  Or at an art supply store.  I prefer Michaels over Hobby Lobby because the latter supposedly denied insurance covering birth control.  An auto parts store was helpful.

I needed a mould and deckle.  I’ve used picture frames before.  This time I bought two 11 x 14” framed canvases.  Removed canvas from both, pried out staples.  I saw on a Youtube video a guy used bees wax to waterproof his mould and deckle.  I bought a piece of metal window screen for the mould.  The deckle was ready as soon as I waxed it. I didn’t need to wax it. But it was fun to get the bees wax.

Looked around, found a plastic storage bin in the basement to serve as a vat.  It held the 10-15 gal. of water slurry.

I bought as many 11 x 17” pieces of felt as I could find at JoAnn’s Fabric.  Perhaps 30.  I washed them in the washing machine at home.

I used my spouse’s kitchen immersion blender.  Then I ordered a new one from Cuisinart to replace the one I used for paper. I used our kitchen blender also.

Books.  I got several from Susanna, my daughter-in-law, for birthday gifts. They tell how to make paper.

Big yellow sponges.  I got these from a Napa Auto Store.  One would have been plenty, although they wear out.

I am looking to create fine paper, and I’m starting with practically zero experience.  So I splurged when I visited the website for Carriage House Paper.  You can purchase thousands of dollars worth of equipment and supplies there.  I bought a minimum amount of cotton linters.  Three pounds, I think.  They come in a box as thick white sheets of paper.  You tear the linters into small pieces, then I put them in a blender with water.  I figured I’d get the finest fiber available to serve as a benchmark of quality.

Once I got the fiber suspended in 15 gallons of water in the vat, I dipped the mould and deckle as one, into the vat and pull it up flat so the water sieved down through the captured pulp and screen back into the vat.  I then couched the wet mat of fibers onto a felt.  Repeated.  Once several felts with paper pulp mats are stacked into a post, the post is pressed between boards to squeeze out as much water as possible.  The felts and papers are hung up to dry.  Often the dry paper is peeled off the felt later.

The result of repeating the above for six months, was that I created an uncounted stack of shockingly white paper, not too strong, with many lumps and clumps of fiber.  I sorted out my work, even weighed each sheet on a gram scale, to make up batches of similar sheets.  I printed my poem. Elation!

Then I got a new knee. This inconvenienced me.

No paper-making for about three months.  Last week I took my paper-making project to the back yard because it is summer.  Using cotton linters again, I made perhaps a dozen sheets, lumpier than ever, but actual paper.

Penny and I drove to visit our son Todd’s family in Duluth, Minnesota, last week.

The story gets marginally better.  Susanna showed me in her Duluth studio how she takes a handful of shredded paper (she bought a shredder for that purpose), puts it in a blender with lots of water, and in 30 seconds, or so, she has a slurry with v. few lumps.  In other words, a way to make super fine paper.  She couched (say “cooched”) her wet mats onto fine woven cloth sheets, instead of felt.  The first few didn’t couch well, but that improved after a few tries. She also used a fine mesh, she called “no see-um.”

Result:  I’m asking my sweetie for an old bedsheet.  After that I’ll try again to make paper, but with fiber from the shredder.  In other words, I’m still far from reaching my quest, but now I want to try to emulate Susanna.

I don’t know how to break the cotton linters into fine enough pieces to make a uniform slurry. (Yes, I know about the Hollander beaters. In fact, the art department at the local university has one. The director won’t return my calls.)

I need smoother felts. I need to make hundreds of more attempts.

I’ll end with a bit of chemistry. Water’s physical properties owe much to the hydrogen bonding of its molecules. Those bonds are relatively weak, but in the aggregate, are strong. It’s what keeps our DNA together. It also keeps the finely divided fibers of paper — the cellulose — attached firmly to other such fibers. Water is the perfect medium to suspend cellulose fibers (attached to water molecules) before they are smashed together physically to create a strong, beautiful, sheet of paper.

Many plant fibers are useful for creating fine paper, even the apple pulp left over from a cider press.