Sitting here, hands damp with bits of cotton stuck to the backs, on the final batch of recycled paper going through my Hollander beater today. I’ll have the last session with the 7th graders at Batesville Middle School this week. I’ll be doing papermaking and twined basketry again with this new batch of students (they rotate classes every 12 weeks).
The kids tore up bunches of recycled art papers which made life much easier for me – I just had to run them through the beater. We’ll work with the three primary colors plus two secondaries and white. They will have one day to pull sheets and one day to pulp paint or form sheets over molds. It is always so much fun to watch them get excited about papermaking. I had one young man during the last session actually go into detail as to how he would set up production to sell his papers! I’ll have to find out how far he got with the project…
AND, my love cut a hole in the top of the beater table and installed a drain in the tub. Boy, does that cut down on all the lifting and bailing I was doing before! Emptying the tub got a whole lot easier!
Time to stir it up again. Should be finished in another 30 minutes.
