Making A Children's Book

Ashley Holbrook &
Alicia Repeczky

Student Projects, Papermaking

Introduction

For our final independent project, we wanted to do something that fully involved both chemistry and art. Of the projects we did during lab periods, we particularly enjoyed the papermaking lab, and so decided that we would apply our papermaking skills and create a project out of handmade paper. We were also very impressed with the exhibit that we saw in the Sewanee Art Gallery which displayed books that the artists had made. To make the project more original and unique, we decided that the artistic component of our project would be to make a children's book out of the paper we produced, and we thought an appropriate topic would be "recycling." We decorated the pages we produced using watercolors, and the short story is our own. In our papermaking process we decided that it would be important to figure out an appropriate amount of sizing to use as we would be painting on our paper with watercolors and the sizing would affect the absorption of the watercolor on the paper. We decided to bind the covers and pages of the book together using an accordion method.

Background

The word paper originates from the Egyptian word papyrus which was similar to what we now know as paper but was woven from a papyrus plant. Following papyrus was the development of parchment, which was made of the skin of a sheep or goat. Eventually, the processes of producing types of paper such as papyrus, parchment, or bamboo paper (created by the Chinese) proved to be too complex, time consuming, and expensive to be produced at the rapid pace of the press.

Papermaking using beaten fibers originated in China in 105 AD. Paper actually used for writing or drawing came about during the 3rd century and the papermaking process slowly moved westward into Asia. American historians have found that the Mayas invented their own paper probably during the 5th century AD. This was the papermaking that was used widely among Mesoamerican cultures and eventually led up to the Spanish conquest.

Procedures

Materials:

cotton linters

beater

water

sizing

deckle box

pelon

felt

spray bottle

filled 2 liter bottle (used as rolling pin)

cups

beakers

bucket

iron

drying board

watercolors

paintbrushes

pencils

ink pen

 

Procedure for papermaking:

  1. Produce your own pulp with explicit directions on how to use the beater. (Dr. Bordley provided us with pulp)
  2. Before beginning, be sure that all buckles on the deckle box are closed tightly, and that the water drainage spout is in the “closed” position.
  3. Fill the deckle box with water – up to about one inch from the top.
  4. Add 600 mL pulp to the deckle box. Stir.
  5. Add 4 drops of sizing to the diluted pulp mixture. Stir.
  6. Be sure the drainage pipe is attached to the spout, and that there is a bucket placed beneath the pipe to catch drainage water.
  7. Turn the drainage spout to the “open” position and let the water drain through the deckle box until a loud suction noise is heard.
  8. Be sure to let the water drain thoroughly, or else the paper wafer will be too wet for a successful transfer. When the water has drained through thoroughly, the wafer will appear matted down onto the screen as if it has been sucked from the other side (which is exactly what is happening).
  9. Once the water has drained thoroughly, close the drainage spout.
  10. Carefully unbuckle the buckles on the sides of the deckle box and remove the plastic deckle box container. Be careful to remove it slowly and straight-upward to avoid damaging the fragile wafer.
  11. Remove the mould on which the wafer has been formed.
  12. Lay a piece of clean pelon on top of a piece of felt. Dampen the pelon using a spray water-bottle.
  13. Gently turn the mould over and press the wafer onto the pelon. Try to make this a relatively quick motion, so the wafer does not attach too firmly to the screen as some of the water is squeezed out.
  14. When transferring the wafer from the mould to the pelon, press gently and slowly “peel” the mould up, allowing the wafer to cling to the pelon.
  15. Once the wafer is successfully transferred, gently lay a second piece of pelon on top of the wafer, followed by a second piece of felt.
  16. Gently roll a 2-liter bottle filled with water back and forth over the covered wafer only a few times.
  17. Carefully remove the top layer of felt and pelon, again, always being careful not to damage the wafer.
  18. Now the wafer is ready to dry. Pick up the piece of pelon that the wafer is still attached to, and lightly press the piece of pelon against a drying board, so that the wafer touches the board.
  19. Peel back the pelon so that the wafer is transferred onto the drying board.
  20. After the wafer has dried on the drying board for a least a couple of minutes, carefully remove it (you may use your hands, as long as it is dry enough that you will not break it) and place it on a dry piece of pelon (which should be on top of a dry piece of felt).
  21. Using a regular household iron, carefully iron the wafer in order to remove moisture and activate the sizing. The wafer can be ironed either when it is still damp or after it has dried, but it must be done at some point to activate the sizing.
  22.  Repeat steps 1-20, increasing the amount of sizing by four drops each time. We recommend three trials at least (using 4, 8, and 12 drops of sizing increasingly), but more may be done. Also, the increments may be modified (3,6,9 drops as opposed to 4,8,12), but we suggest beginning with at least three when working with this amount of pulp.
  23. After the desired number of trials have been completed, test the effects of the different levels of sizing by applying watercolor paint (or just plain water will work) to the paper, and observing its behavior. If the watercolor paint is absorbed very quickly and bleeds into the paper (spreading beyond the original line painted) then more sizing is needed. If the watercolor paint simply sits on the surface of the paper, and does not absorb at all (as if you are painting on wax-paper), then less sizing is needed. The goal is to have the paper absorb the watercolors but to maintain the bold, clean strokes you make.
  24. Repeat as many trials as necessary to find an optimum amount of sizing. 


Procedure for making the book:


1. Draw the images in pencil first in order to prevent mistakes when painting them with the watercolor.
2. Paint the different images with the watercolor.
3. Handwrite the story with an ink pen.
4. Bind the book by folding a sheet of computer paper in the accordion style and then gluing the right side of the fold to a sheet of the story.
5. Repeat the gluing until every sheet is bound to the accordion.
6. To make the binding look more professional, glue a sheet of homemade paper around the spine of the book.

Observations and Data

Here is an image of our finished paper. We produced 21 sheets in total!

 

Amount of Pulp Trial Observations:

Trial Amount of Pulp (mL) Observations during papermaking Observations after drying
1 400 mL Not enough pulp was used, so it did not cover the entire deckle screen. Couching was nearly impossible. Pulp lost its form and got very messy, we could not produce wafer. Did not produce a full rectangle sheet of paper, looked brittle and as though fibers were not well attached to one another.
2 600 mL Couching was successful and the wafer was a good thickness. Appropriate thickness for pages, produced a clean, smooth sheet of paper.
3 800 mL Wafer was much thicker, couching was successful. Thicker and stronger than trial 2, more appropriate for front and back cover pages.

Amount of Sizing Trial Observations:

Trial Amount of pulp Drops of sizing Observations during papermaking Observations during painting
1 600 mL 4 wafer seemed more fragile. fibers less bound together. was difficult to transfer from pelon to drying board. watercolor paint absorbed into paper very easily, and the original line we drew bled into a blurry line, as did ink pen.
2 600 mL 8 wafer was much more solid and transferred more smoothly. less fragile. it was much easier to transfer it to the drying board. watercolor paint absorbed into paper but ink held in its place and did not bleed, maintaining original form of brush stroke. If pen was applied onto wet watercolor, ink colors bled into one another.
3 600 mL 12 wafer more solid, similar to trial 2, a bit more trouble transferring from pelon to drying board. paper behaved like wax paper, no absorbancy whatsoever, watercolor simply sat ontop of paper.
cover pages 800 mL 10 since there was more pulp, the wafer was thicker and took longer to dry than the 600 mL wafers. ink pen did not bleed, nor did paint pen. Ink was absorbed but did not bleed.

Conclusions

We were able to conclude from our trials that the more pulp used to make paper the more drops of sizing needed to make for a good sheet of paper to paint on. We came to the conclusion that the cover pages needed to be thicker and stronger because they were protecting the book so we used 800mL of pulp and 10 drops of sizing. The inside pages of our book are made up of 600mL of pulp and 8 drops of sizing. For both amounts of pulp we filled the deckle box to about 1.5 inches from the top with water. These amounts of pulp, sizing and water allowed us to make strong, smooth sheets of paper to ease the painting process. The accordion method we used to bind the pages made our work look more professional and we hope it will also keep the book together without the pages tearing out.

The differences between our original plan and our final experiment were mostly the changes we had to make in the amount of sizing we were using. At first we thought that we should use 12 drops of sizing instead of the 8 we ended up using, because we thought that we wanted our paper to be less absorbant. Then we realized that we did in fact want the watercolor to absorb into the paper, we just didn't want it to be absorbant enough that our watercolors or ink bled. Also, we started our project using cotton linter pulp left over from our previous lab, but we ran into a minor setback and our original source of pulp ran out. Thank goodness Dr. Bordley was able to help us produce new pulp! So, the pulp we used for the remainder of our project was fresh-beaten pulp, still made of cotton linters. At the beginning of our project we planned to bind the pages of our book by punching holes in the pages and tying them together with some kind of string, but we ended up finding a more complex and sophisticated procedure for binding our book: the accordion method.

Links

HISTORY: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papermaking

STEP-BY-STEP PAPERMAKING: http://www.tutorials.com/06/0697/0697.asp

PAPERMAKING SUPPLIES: http://www.papermaking.net/

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr. Bordley and Carolyn Fitz for their assistance throughout the course of our project!