Making paper

There is such a constant stream of junk mail coming through the door every day and no matter how much i ask companies to just email me to make it paperless or tick the boxes to say don't send me your mail outs, they blindly ignore me and tear up loads of trees to send me information i'm not going to read and put straight in the bin.  What a waste of time money and resources!

Anyway wondering what i could do with these mails i thought about recycling them into paper we could use especially for Sophie to draw on or for me to jot notes or to wrap something in. So we had a go at turning this junk mail into paper.  First off we didn't use newspaper as that is poor quality paper that has already been recycled, instead we used the the white mail outs such as letters from the banks as they use posh high quality paper.  Our dentist sent us 5 letters in 1 week asking us to go there and give them money to get our teeth checked a bit excessive but a good example of a company wasting money and handy for us as we used this for making paper from.

I was really surprised how easy it was to make paper. First we tore up the paper and put it in a hand blender with some water and wizzed it up.  The more the paper was wizzed the finer the pulp became.

I put the pulp in a big pan of water and used a fat protector i bought from the pound shop and bent the handle up, i used a fat protector as this is made using a fine mesh that does not let the pulp pass through it.  i put the mesh into the pan of water and pulp swished the water around with my hand a bit and pulled up the mesh and hey presto the mesh was covered in pulp.  I let this drip dry for 20 mins and then dabbed it off with a bit of kitchen towel and then i tried a few experiments.

One was just pulp and it was dried ready to use within 30 min from coming out of the water with an iron which i don't think worked well as it scorched the paper and left my iron covered in dried pulp and my ironing board in fluffy pulp.  The next batch i added petals that had been blown off the plants and also ironed that and the heat from the iron faded all the colour in the petals.  Finally i made a petal paper and left it to dry naturally which took 3 days as it wasn't a sunny day but the colours in the petals remained intact, and the paper stay flat unlike the ironed paper which got all curly, so naturally drying was my favourite way of making paper.

Now i'm loving that i'm sent junk mail as i can turn it into something useful