Keeping Up With Kaht and Devin: Paper Making!

Devin and I are both very DIY kind of people. When we see something, we think, ‘Oh, we could do that!’ Even when our initial attempts go wayward, we chalk it up to experience and do it again! So when it came time to decide on our wedding invitations, we of course said, “We can do that!” and thus began our paper making endeavor. We still have yet to settle on the actual invite design, but we know that it will include handmade paper. Working with recycled materials is so satisfying and there is certainly a surplus of recycled paper just waiting to be re-born as natural, beautiful, unique handmade paper. Check out our process below and give it a try yourself! It is messy, requires a good chunk of the day to accomplish, and a good size workspace, but the end product is so lovely!

Use a blender that you will never want to make smoothies in again as it will forever have bits of paper stuck to it! We found ours in the Re-Use Zone at our Recycle Center.
We wanted exactly 5x7 size paper so we made our own frames out of cardboard and duct tape. They held up pretty well! (Thanks to the Duct Tape)

Be ready to get messy! We took over the whole kitchen for most of the day.

Our final product drying on the living room floor. The colorful bits are dried flowers that we ground up and added to the pulp mixture. It added a nice hint of color that was subtle.
Want to try your hand at paper making? Check out this great site.

Some tips we can offer are;
-a paper shredder worked really well to shred the paper into small bits. Save your hands! -don’t bother soaking the paper overnight unless it is really heavy duty cardboard. We just soaked what we needed for ten minutes in hot water and it was good to go! -soak small batches at a time. We found that we also soaked more paper than we actually needed and ended up with wet soggy paper that we needed to use up or dispose of. -we put our freshly made pieces of paper onto 8x10 pieces of felt and then stacked and pressed those between two boards using 4 ‘C’ clamps. It worked really well to get a lot of the water out. Then we laid the paper onto a sheet on the floor to dry overnight.

Have fun! -k