summer 2012 • 1

H A N D PA P E R M A K I NGvolume 27, number 1 • summer 2012

Letter from the Editor 2

A Home-Built, Hardware-Store Beater dave reina 3

Paper Sample: Hardware-Store Beater Test Run #1 donna koretsky & shannon brock, carriage house paper 9

Eco-Ergonomic Cooking Equipment loreto d. apilado 10

Korean Papermaking Goes West: Building the Anne F. Eiben Hanji Studio in Clevelandaimee lee 12

Paper Sample: Morgan Hanji aimee lee 17

The Flax Brake: Then and Now suzanne sawyer 18

Calling All Potential Mould Makerstimothy moore 21

Computer-Driven Laser Cutter for Chiaroscuro Watermarksbrian queen 26

Sarvisberry: A Green Studiogibby waitzkin 30

Hand Papermaking in the Time of Climate Change maggie puckett 33

Hand Papermakers Find Inspiration from the Paper Industryjonathan korejko 36

ON Cheney Pulp and Paper Company: The Half Stuff Storypeter thomas 39

ON Capellades Paper Mill Museum: Amongst the Catalunyan Hillssimon barcham green 41

Authors 47

Advertisers and Contributors 48

front cover: Mould maker’s loom by Timothy Moore. It stands just under 6 feet tall. In this view, it is freestanding, set up with brackets. To save space, the loom can

be fastened to a wall. This loom can create a laid facing or a backing for a paper mould measuring up to 30 x 40 inches. A small laid facing is in progress; a few inches of

laid wires have been twisted into place. The operator stands in front of the right side of the loom, resting his/her foot on the foot treadle to raise and lower the beam and

rod from which the facing hangs in order to add new laid wires one at a time. Photo by Pati Scobey, courtesy of the author. back cover: Selection of tools for Korean

papermaking set-up, drawn by Aimee Lee.

summer 2012 • 3736 • hand papermaking

As I travel around Britain making paper with children and adults, I visit commercial paper mills as part of my professional develop-ment. They are very welcoming, and I find that they inspire me to try new things in my own studio. We think of industry as being big and brash. I find creativity lurking there in unexpected ways.

I have gone to mills as big as four Olympic stadiums; observed logs being transformed into pulp; watched newly formed paper running through machines at sixty miles per hour (one hundred km/h); and seen bales of pulp board dumped into hydropulpers, coming out the other end of a machine seventy-five minutes later, cut, packaged, and loaded onto pallets ready for dispatch. I have been to science labs and examined paper being tested for strength, absorption, thickness, and fiber quality; observed currency papers being made with beautiful watermarks; and learned about fibers, the machines that prepare them, the way they are grown, dyed, dried, coated with minerals, embossed, de-inked, and recycled. I always leave a site thirsty for more information and ready to trans-late my observations into my own practice.

There are two mills in particular which I visit regularly. Both sites have given me a profound look into the world of the ma-chine papermaker, and each has continued to help me improve my skills.

The Weidmann Whiteley Papermill, in Pool, North Yorkshire, specializes in producing paper with a unique combination of re-cycled denim thread and wool giving it the right amount of resil-ience to serve as calender bowls. These large, blue rolls, 30 feet long (ten meters) and 3 feet (one meter) in diameter, are sold to the papermaking industry for machines used to calender or polish newspaper or magazine paper.

Frogmore Paper Mill is in Hemel Hempstead, near London. The world’s first continuous papermaking machine was installed here by the Fourdrinier brothers in 1803. The mill has always produced recycled paper and continues to do so today on a 1902

Hand Papermakers

Find Inspiration from the

Paper Industry

jonathan korejko

Calender bowl made with recycled blue denim paper

from the Weidmann Whiteley Papermill in Yorkshire,

England. Photo: Toby Albrecht. Above: Jim

Patterson (left) with Roberto Mannino (center) and

Marilyn Wold watching the first bit of pulp flowing

onto the wet end of the Pilot Machine during the

October 2011 Dard Hunter Conference, Frogmore

Paper Mill, England. Courtesy of Brian Queen.

Roberto Mannino, untitled drawing from the Machinae series, 2011, 42 x 30 cm (16.5 x 11.8 inches), pen and ink on inkjet paper, drawn during the 2011

Dard Hunter Regional Conference at Frogmore Paper Mill, UK. This drawing depicts a pulp-painting machine, quoting Leonardo’s mechanical draw-

ings and inspired by industrial paper machines. Mannino remarked, “I always feel inspired by the technical aspects of papermaking, so looking at those

machines is daydreaming for me.” Courtesy of the artist.

summer 2012 • 3938 • hand papermaking

To make beggars’ rags into paper, they must first be made into pulp. I have always wanted to add a line, something like “Bullies (or banks) beat beggars to a pulp,” but could never figure how to fit it into the poem. As hand papermakers, we know the chal-lenges of beating fiber into pulp. It takes so much work that of-ten, instead of harvesting a plant or gathering old rag, many hand papermakers use pre-processed fibers such as abaca, cotton, and hemp that are sold by hand papermaking suppliers in sheet form. Many people refer to these sheets as “linters” but technically the term is “dry lap.” Used cotton rag is another product available to the hand papermaker in dry lap form. This is commonly known as “half stuff.”

The term half stuff comes from the fact that these rags are only processed halfway. Traditionally, after rags were gathered, cut, and cooked, they were processed in two different types of Hollander beaters. First they were run through a breaker. This Hollander-like machine had a roll and bedplate with fewer and sharper blades so that it would cut and break up the fiber without causing too much hydration or fibrillation. The resulting “half stuff” would then be transferred into a refining beater where it would be further beaten to the requirements of the paper being made. As the process of papermaking industrialized some mills began to specialize in the production of pulp rather than paper.

I have used half stuff for papermaking ever since I built my first Hollander beater in the 1970s. At that time there was only one source for half stuff: the Cheney Pulp and Paper Company (pro-nounced “Cheeney”) in Franklin, Ohio. They sold it in 400-pound bales of damp-pressed, garbled-up rag. When you bought a bale you paid a lot of money to ship water that would soon evaporate out of it. Today their half stuff comes in dry lap form, so it is much

ON Cheney Pulp and Paper Company:

The Half Stuff Story

peter thomas

Rags make paper.Paper makes money.Money makes banks.

Banks make loans.Loans make beggars.

Beggars make rags.

Above: The rag cutter, processing waste thread for half stuff.

All photos courtesy of the author.

paper machine. Frogmore is run by Apsley Paper Trail, a chari-table trust, as a heritage, leisure, and education center, encom-passing a visitor center, museum, gallery, and shop. It also runs a recycling program for schools, turning schools’ waste paper into new paper on the mill’s Pilot Machine.

Tiny compared to most, the Pilot Machine is only 25 feet (7.6 meters) long and 2 feet (0.6 meters ) wide, and can make 100 tons of paper per annum (compared to 200,000 tons in the big mills). The Pilot Machine makes novelty paper using materials such as recycled denim, flower petals, wasp nests, elephant dung, and seeds. It also produces technical paper, for instance, rag blot-ters for conservators. The Pilot Machine forms the centerpiece of the mill visit. Because of its size and accessibility, the machine is an excellent teaching tool to introduce how a fourdrinier works. In the fall of 2011, hand papermakers involved in the British Dard Hunter conference used the machine to make rose petal paper.

Jim Patterson manages the Pilot Machine and also runs a hand papermaking unit at Frogmore and in Somerset, making high-quality, world-famous watercolor papers known as “Two Riv-ers Paper.” Patterson is a fourth-generation hand and machine pa-permaker with a lot of experience. “Running a small papermaking machine like the one I use at Frogmore requires just as much skill as making paper by hand,” remarked Patterson. “The materials are the same, the physics is the same. The two processes are very

similar and I don’t separate them in my mind when I am working. They are a means to the same end.”

“Being a good papermaker implies that you have a deep un-derstanding of the fibers and the science involved,” Patterson con-tinued. “It doesn’t matter whether you have gained that knowl-edge through hand papermaking or by running a machine. You have to understand the material, and solve problems with it as they occur. The more you understand the fibers in the vat or on the machine, the better you will perform when something needs changing. You’ll find that, over time, you’ll become interested in all sorts of machines and techniques for making paper, and always want to learn more. Hand papermakers and machine makers each have something to gain from the other’s expertise. If you under-stand both processes, you will be a quicker learner, and a better papermaker.”

I have visited Frogmore many times, and I always return home with a new outlook on my work. The combination of heritage site, recycling unit, hand- and machine-made papers convinces me that almost anything is possible in the world of papermaking, and that I owe it to myself and the people I teach to learn as much as I can about paper in all its forms. Papermills are amazing places, and I recommend that you try and arrange a visit. You’ll be sur-prised at how much there is to discover!

Brian Queen making “Two Rivers” paper at Frogmore Paper Mill during the October 2011 Dard Hunter

Conference. Notice the vacuum table behind him equipped with a domestic wet-vac. Courtesy of the author.