Happy Valentine’s Day! I share with you a heart, a paper heart—made from scraps of my notebook paper. And I share with you my poetical heart-felt reason for making {recycling} paper: the old chapters provide space (quite concretely) to write the new chapters Now, to share the story of how this paper-making heart came to be: It all started with a delay due to the North Dakota weather. December 23, 2022 I was supposed to be in sunny Arizona—arriving in the afternoon from a flight from Bismarck. But the roads were closed, and my itinerary was changed to fly from Minot the next day. Thus, I was at my friend Sara’s house, where she was about to open the door to paper making. Me: I have a whole bunch of paper that I want to burn, but I haven’t had access to a fire. Sara: Why not use it to make new paper? Me: Tell me more. Sara told me more and the process involved scraps of paper, an overnight soak, a blender, a tub, and a screen. I went home and YouTube and blogs (especially Paper Slurry) told me even more. December 24, 2022 12:30 PM As I drive to Minot, I decide that I must stop at Hobby Lobby on my way back (in a week) to pick up some paper-making supplies. 1:38 PM I receive a text from the airline saying that my flight was cancelled, so I end up staying with my friend and her mom for Christmas Eve and Christmas. On Christmas Eve afternoon, my friend and I join the crowds of people last-minute shopping. We include Hobby Lobby in our stops: no paper making kit. Next stop is Target; I make a make-shift paper-making kit of a blender (Penelope, the Paper Pulverizer) and two different strainers. At the grocery store, I buy a grease splatter screen. December 26, 2022 I drive back home and rip up some paper—it gets to take an overnight soak in a tub. December 27, 2022 The paper gets blended. The two strainers didn’t really work to hold and shape the pulp, but I noticed that the splatter guard would do a good job of straining out the water from the pulp. Thus, I piled the pulp onto the strainer and thought, “What if I took the pulp and shaped it into a cookie cutter?” I grabbed my odd assortment of cookie cutters—I tried an umbrella and a heart. The umbrella didn’t work, but the heart worked beautifully. So I made more hearts. And then some more hearts. Some of which I later painted and added to river I had painted earlier in the year. February 2023
I receive some actual paper-making kits and make some rectangular sheets. With Valentine’s Day approaching and a vendor fair with the title “Love is in the Air,” I wonder if I could use the heart cookie cutter with the paper-making screens. Yes. The answer to that wonder is yes. And my heart grew to love the heart-shaped paper, a shape I never really fully enjoyed before (I've never really been a heart shape person). And as I made the paper (which takes much longer to dry than I ever imagined!), I come to realize how beautifully poetical this whole process is: the old chapters provide space (quite concretely) to write the new chapters. Thus, I am continuing to make paper. My goal is to “scrapbook” a writing from my old notebooks—to type it into a collection of writing—every day, and then rip up the page(s) to make new papers. These old notebooks I have filled with scraps of ideas, thoughts of the past, of the future, of the world. And these scraps of writing are being shaped into scrapbooks and the scraps of the paper are creating new spaces to write new chapters. Nothing is wasted. All things can be made new. That is the beauty in paper-making.
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AuthorErika Joy is a fan of haiku, paper, and scrapbooks. She has a scrapbook of poetry and creative non-fiction available on Amazon: Hope is the Color of the Sun. ArchivesCategories |