The colour of your pulp is always darker than the resulting paper. Using construction paper and coloured paper for your 'dye' will create a wider gap between pulp and paper colour. If you want a bright colour, just really add lots of coloured paper to your pulp.

For a smoother finish, slap your paper up on a piece of glass like a window or sliding glass door. You can also leave it stuck to one 'felt' and clothes-pin it up (by the fabric, so the paper isn't marred), or you can remove the sheet from both 'felts' and let it dry, this will give you a rougher sheet.

Depending where you live, time to dry will vary. Give it overnight and check.

Side-by-side comparisons of drying techniques follow, as do examples of how different writing/drawing implements look on this kind of handmade paper.

Paper is tough, but be nice to it when you are removing it from the 'felts'.

[STEP 2]

Note where the forks will fit into the tab inside the holes in your 35mm canister. The forks need to be sufficiently long to catch that.

Well, actually, they don't need to be that long, but it helps later on.

[Go to the next step->]

So here's how I made my screen transparent for my last submission to the Transparent Screens group. I'll refer to the photos as being numbered clockwise:

1 2

4 3

First, I took photo 2 (ignore the windows and the grid for now). Actually, I took about four or five shots and chose the best one.

Second, I removed some of the bottles, introduced the monitor, and took photo 1 (again, ignore the grid for now, and again, I actually took multiple and chose the best).

Then, I opened these two photos in my photo editing tool and put each one in a layer, photo 1 on top of photo 2. I did a slight bit of rotating and moving to get the backgrounds to line up. If I had a tripod, of course, they would have lined up automatically.

Now look at the windows and the grid in photo 1. GIMP has this great tool called "perspective transformation" that's perfect for this job; I lined up the rectangle onto the screen surface.

Next I switched to the other layer; see photo 2. The grid is still there, and now covers the area of the image I need to pull out. I set the transformation tool to "corrective," which causes this area to get stretched flat into a rectangular image.

I took this flattened image and made it the background of the monitor in photo 1. Then I had to tweak the cropping to get it right, and I had to do some colour correction. That was probably the most painful part of the whole process. The final desktop image is shown in photo 3.

Photo 4 shows the final setup. I moved the bottles on the left out of the way, and took the final shot from the original angle. Voila!

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580ex II on boom with white shoot through umbrella triggered with RadioPopper JrX.

5D Mark II, 24-105mm. Check out the behind the scenes below.

Once your screen is in the pulp, shake it back and forth just a little, evening and settling the pulp along the screen. Continue rocking/shaking the screen as you pull it up out of the vat. If you screw up, just flip the screen over and tap it against the water in the vat, the pulp will fall off--it prefers the water, slippery stuff.

Stand on it, centring yourself on the post. Hang out for a while, a few minutes is enough.

Ta-dah! You've just made a really fab corner! :D

The best things about doing corners like this is that they're strong because you don't have to clip the seam allowances at all, and the corner is always nice and sharp.

Time for the poor man's press. On some floor you can clean easy or don't care about, lay down your post and put your board on top.

Well, there's a piece of paper. Yay!

If you are using a pulse blender, throw your paper in and then blend. Otherwise, turn it on some medium speed and pop your paper through the hole in the lid.

Ideally, your bits of torn paper should be around 1x1 inch square. I'm using a pretty burly blender, so mine are a little bigger.

Start tearing up your paper. You could cut it if you want to, or have bad hands, but tearing is quicker overall.

Whoops! Here I am trying to show you the way to do things and I go and overfill the blender!

Now you can remove your damp paper, and let it dry in a well-ventilated place, or you can keep it on the felt. Comparisons of drying techniques are here. REMEMBER: always pull from the corners and gently. Hang your 'felts' out to dry, recycle the newspaper.

Rinse your screen, dry paper will be a nightmare to remove.

Paper pulp will do a number on your pipes, so use your screen or a colander in the sink when you drain your vat.

Brown paper bags don't blend up that well, so give it more blending if you don't like the chunks (which I do).

Soak up more water with your sponge through the back of the screen. Move around, paying attention to the edges.

. . . flip it over. The water in the screen should hold the paper to your screen enough for you to do this.

With your sheet formed, tilt your screen to drain the excess water out. When its only dripping intermittently, you can couch it.

This is what you're going for. The paper's cellulose will bind itself, you just need to gather it evenly on your screen.

This is how the pulp looks with some of that blue flyer thrown in. Remember that your dried paper will be one to three shades lighter than your pulp.

Using a screen when draining will help you reclaim any leftover pulp, which can be squeezed out and left to dry. When you make paper later, this pulp can be broken up and re-blended.

. . . then the pulp will follow with some suggestive plopping.

The water will pour off first. . .

When you're done making sheets, top off your pile with another 'felt' and some more newspaper. The result is called a "post".

This ended up being a nice neutral-like light blue.

Cover your new paper with another 'felt', then some more newspaper, and you're ready to go again.

Starting from a corner, pull your screen off the paper. If it won't let go, plop it back down and soak up more water with the sponge.

This is "couching". Line up your screen on your 'felts' and. . .

Mix up your pulp and water by stirring your hand around in it. This is called "charging" your vat. You'll want to do this before you make each sheet, or thereabouts, any time the paper and water start to separate.

Add your pulp to the vat. I use three blenders of pulp to one blender of water. This will make a nice soup, not too thick, not too watery, and about the right height (near the middle) in the vat.

The lid is very important in this process. If your pulp goes flying all over it will be awful to clean up. You want to blend until your motor sounds a little tired (best explanation), then up your speed and blend for another 10-30 seconds.

After three to five sheets, you'll find that your paper is getting thin and maybe being a brat about releasing from the screen. Time to add more pulp. This batch is white with some brown paper bag thrown in.

Squeeze excess water out of your sponge as you go, you want to get as much water out of your paper as possible so it will release from the screen.

My two favorite ways to tie a scarf:

Hacking Twist

Chi Chi Wrap

I learned the first from my friend Amy Storer-Scalia (who learned it from her dentist!) and I invented the second.

I didn't have any cleats to go under my board so I pulled apart 2 clothes pegs and glued them to the underside of the board....Easy!!!!