Make Paper - Beating the Jeans into Pulp

Gretchen Schermerhorn: I am Gretchen from Pyramid Atlantic and today we are making paper by hand out of old blue jeans and in this clip, I am going to show you how to load the beater, put your blue jeans in the beater and the steps it takes it to do that. Also, I am going to show you how to set up your station for paper making.

So first, what you will want to do is after we have rinsed our blue jeans you want to bring them into the beater and today, we are working with a one pound Hollander beater. You can buy these through paper making companies or some people actually build their own but this is ours and first what we are going to do is fill up the beater about half way with water. So I am going to turn on the beater and fill it up with water then what we will do is we are just slowly going to add the blue jeans to it and until you have the full one pound added. Then you want to slowly add weight to the back of the beater. Alright, now when the pulp is beating you have a little bit of time and during that time, I actually like to set up my station for paper making. So first, what I want to show you is this is called half-stuff and what it is, is it is blue jean fabric that has been beaten in a beater for a short amount of time and then made into sort of a cake kind of thick piece of paper and it is great for people who don't want to purchase a beater or don't have the space and so this way, you can just soak it in water and put it into a blender and it makes great, fluffy, nice pulp for sheets. So just another thing you might want to consider. Now our paper making station, the things we will need are we will need a tub and this is called in paper making, it is called a vat. We will need a mold and deckle that's used for paper making our screen, we will need a board and I like actually setting mine up on a piece of wood like this on one side to facilitates drainage and then also, these are great, these wool felts that you can often get at army-navy supply companies and such like that and then we also have another vat over here and inside of that vat are our pellons and this is interfacing. You can purchase at most fabric stores and I also have put them inside in some water so that they will get nice and hydrated and these go in between all of your sheets which I will show you in a few minutes. In addition, I also like standing on some mats because in this whole process, you are standing so it is nice to have that. In the next clip, I am going to be showing you how to unload the beater properly as well as adding the proper amount of pulp to your vat to make paper.