Paper Lamination

This morning, I committed three pieces of laminated paper, as planned.  Lamination, in case you're unfamiliar, just means layering. No, it has nothing to do with plastic! A lot of antique furniture is laminated, fine layers of wood glued and pressed and bent together.  And laminated handmade paper is two or more sheets couched (made) one after the other and layered with interesting shapes between them.

Here it's two layers of mixed abaca and cotton linters pulp, laminated with pieces of daylily stems between.  

You can see them clearly here, because the pulp is still soaking wet and translucent. When it dries, only the shape will remain.  So it will be interesting in that it will cast its own shadows.  The reason for the mixture of pulps is that abaca takes shapes very well, since it's soft when dry, and the cotton linters is a bright white, so I'm hoping for the best of both. We'll see.

These are really intended for framing, rather than for use in books or collage work.  So we'll see how they come out.  One little challenge is to couch the second sheet as close as possible to the edges of the first one.  A big like registering prints in a way.

While I was draining and laying these out to dry, the bluejays were shouting angrily at me to get done so they could come back to the feeder.  The woodpeckers and chickadees don't wait, just dive in and feed.  They pretty much look on me as part of the patio furniture. 

Next on the list is to cook the dried iris leaves and see how they go.  The lily flower paper is interesting, in that the shreds of flower are distributed among the pulp, but they don't make an amorphous mass like the cooked leaves.  So I'll try cooking flowers, too and see what happens there.  Depends if you want a paper with a lot of its own color interest or if you want a paper that has a uniform color that can be used differently.  The lily flower is too busy to decorate or draw on, really.