A New Sketch book for traveling

As I sketch more and more I find a need for different paper styles and different materials.  I am working more and more in ink with watercolor paints.  So I created this little sketch book to carry with me.  I used paper from the Khadi Papers India mill.  Their paper is a vat sized cold pressed cotton rag paper made by hand in the heart of the India cotton growing region.  This paper has a soft hand, comes in approximately 140 lb weight and is perfect for watercolor, pen and ink and charcoal/pencil.  I created the sketchbook within a 6 to 7 oz leather wrapper and used cotton twine and hand carved beads to bind it.  The actual paper is held in place without holes by the long stitch binding and can be swapped out when it is full utilized.  I really like the 6 by 6 inch size, it gives a great 6 x 12 landscape mode.

Here's my first sketch in this new book.  I'm quite happy with it.

Paper on books and books on paper

Well Phred has me really going here on all this paper making and book making - oops, sorry Phred, "Book Binding" - stuff. Seems a day can't go by now but Farmer Brown is walking down the lane to the mailbox and coming back mumbling to himself about where in tarnation are these packages coming from and why?

He mumbles into the dooryard and places the packages on the little shelf in the mud room and calls out to Mrs. Farmer Brown, "Here's another one Hon. What you think these crazy people are up to?"

She just kind of grunts a reply and then everyone seems to forget about the whole thing.

Phred meanwhile has his ear peeled for the sound of one of his Baker's Feet Irregulars to come charging down the warren and into the book binding shop to give him the breathless news that "another one has arrived."

Then they call me down from whereever I'm contemplating the proper wax to use for the current temperature and humidity level and give me my orders to go up to the house and bring that package back here where it belongs.

Well I guess I've carried a few things in my life and perhaps helped an item or two move from here to over there without too much attention called and so I must be the perfect stooge for this ongoing game. I'm noticing though that a couple of the youngsters are watching my every move and it's almost like they are in pantomime of what I'm about to do or just have done. Got to watch them or they'll be trying their hand at the moving game perhaps a bit before they're ready.

Anyway, back to the packages. Seems like they all are coming from the Amazon or some such. Not so big, but solid and heavy, like there were books or something.

So one day I just stood there after handing it to Phred and seeming like daring him to not rip it open while I watched. He couldn't hold out very long and soon enough he showed me that I was indeed hauling coal to Newcastle so to speak. Yeap, I'm bring books into the bindery, the place where Phred makes books, the place where he tells me books are flying out to new homes all around the world.

I do admit he had me haul two packages down to the mailbox where the postman made them move from here to somewhere else, but seems as though we are getting more books in than books are moving out.

Oh well, I guess some fella named Keith Smith must need to get some lettuce too, he sure packs a wallop in his books for shear numbers of diagrams and curlicues and needle in and needle outing he describes in his books. Guess we've got Vol 1 and 3 now and Phred seems pretty keen to find vol 2, 4 and 5 soon it seems. Real catchy titles too. Non Adhesive Binding - Books Without Paste or Glue Volume 1 - now there's one sure to keep you up at night until you get it finished!

As for the outgoing? Well if the books coming in are about paper, the books going out are on paper. This week we shipped a set of ten to a gallery down in LA. ECO-logical Gallery I guess they call it. They specialize in reusing things in new ways and I guess Phred's Digital Journals with the computer disks and funny parts were a big hit in the recycle-reuse-repurpose world.

Also one of the painter rabbits' little canvases went off to a new home up in the cold weather country.

So, paper in and paper out. Not as catchy as wax on - wax off, but hey I can only supply one memorable quote per lifetime. Wonder what ever happened to that Okinawan guy I used to surf with. He sure was into those tiny trees............

Surfbunny

Here's the pics of one of Phred's Digital Journals:

Paper making 101

Phred asked me to tell you a bit about paper making and the problems I've been having. I have been learning from scratch, pulling my whiskers out with worry - why wont it work?

I guess I better start at the beginning.

Paper is made of fibers, and being on a high fiber diet we have lots of fibers in all the warrens, the fine linen Linum usitatissimum the ladies have been weaving has wonderful long fibers, but it is way to valuable to experiment with. Carrot tops are OK but there is a lot of work and little paper making usable fiber. One thing that is in abundance is corn husks, guess humans and bunnies alike don't eat the husks of corn.

So following the directions from one of our tomes I found I had a lot of steps to go through to get usable paper making fiber from corn husks.

First you have to cook the husks, 12 hours later they were still too tough to do much with. Well back to burrowing through the library. Ah, you need an alkali to speed up the process. Soda ash from burnt wood ashes works and Farmer Jones heats his house with wood and has this big pile of ash...

I won't go into all the detail on how we finally made the stuff except to say it was a long hot day.

Cook the husks in soda ash and water, 3 hours later the the husk fibers are soft and pull apart.

The liquid went from being crystal clear to dark brown and smelt a little sweet, but what to do with it?

Well that started a long discussion among the brew bunnies, the baker bunnies and Aunt Aretha, our resident canning and pickling maven. It ended up we neutralized the alkali with acid - vinegar to be precise - if we keep this up Farmer Jones and his wife are going to wonder where all the pickling juice went, Aunt Aretha warned me she'd be making more than paper outta my hide if the pickling storehouse ended up getting a lock down right before cucumber harvest!

After you cook the fiber you have to rinse, then rinse again until the water runs clear, the underground stream the washer bunnies use was excellent for this step - those bunnies are pretty smart too, they had little grove shelves all worked into the stream bed and bank for sitting and holding pots and even a spot to keep their "refreshments" cool. I think I have to come back down here sometime and see just what those bunnies have found to need cooling.

After rinsing you have to beat the fibers, with all the energy the youngsters have you would think that was an easy thing to do. It took a little creative thinking but we put the fiber between some plastic and had them youngsters run and jump and hop 'til it was beaten to a pulp.

Then take the pulp and suspend it in water and use an old window screen to make sheets. Getting the thickness right took a little practice.

After forming the sheets they had to be pressed to get the water out and then dried. Took some thinking here too to get the pressing figured out, but the carpenter crew had an extra couple of barn boards and there was a rock or two we rolled on top and then the whole thing kind'a blended into Farmer Jones ol' "someday might be useful pile" out behind the machine shed and the sun did our work of drying.

From 1 pound of corn husks I got 12 thin sheets of paper.

I'll get Colin to take a picture and post here this afternoon. Not sure what we're going to do with the paper yet. Seems like it would make a great painting surface, or maybe note cards. Real pretty gold color and nice texture. Boy, it all makes me hungry for some of Juanita's tamales, maybe I'll hop over to the cooks den and see what's on the stove.........

BB