Paper adventures taking a rest for the moment, grapevine pens return

Here's the complete output of several days' work!  the post i.e. stack, of iris and abaca paper

 complete with wild grapevine twig as suggested binding for potential book and the post of iris and cotton linters paper different room, different light

 About twenty plus pages in all. I doubt if you can see much difference in pix, in fact in person either, between the two types, though I can!  it's a bit like that joke about aha, this isn't Ahasuerus the First, it's Ahasuerus the SECOND!  one distinct difference was in the handling though.

The abaca mix came pretty easily off the support when it was dry, but the cotton linters was much harder to remove. Hence the scraps in the picture. My paper making teacher used to impress on us never to throw away any scrap even the smallest, of handmade paper, too valuable.  And never to cut it, a crime of the first water.

The scraps will come into some other artwork, I expect.

and that's last year's entire harvest of iris leaves all used up.  When I recover from this bout, I'll make some abaca paper and some cotton linters paper, which will come out cream and white respectively. And will probably make a nice partnership with some of the iris paper, in use. 

I went walking down at Plainsboro Pond this morning before it got too hot, taking pix and watching birds, tons of song and activity, a couple of families of catbirds.  A couple of the babies were kittenbirds, too young to fly away when I watched them, just making that little miow noise they do. 

And in the course of observing them, I noticed, joy, that there are wild grapevines growing down there now.  This is a big deal, because I cut twigs off them for pens (van Gogh did this, too, in his poverty stricken days, which was all his days), and use them as lovely binding twigs for handmade books.  

My other secret place to gather them was right behind the condo I used to live in, by the water.  I was able to gather and dry them to give to drawing students, along with my homemade walnut ink, so they could be really authentic, which actually was quite thrilling to them.  Then those vines went away.  Nothing else in the hedges did, so I'm not sure what happened. Not sprayed, otherwise other vegetation would show it.  

So I was downhearted at this loss, until today, and now I have a new source.  Yay.  Just a few little prunings, won't hurt the plant, and if I take already dead twigs, even better.