To make flower paper you may either gather readily available plants or use dried plants. For large-scale papermaking, the material you choose can be an inexpensive by-product of the agriculture industry, such as harvest gleanings. Agricultural by-products, or waste, such as pea leaves or any similar harvest remnant, are readily available. Rice grasses, any grain grasses other than wheat (which may contain ergot, a toxic fungus), foliage from wood producing shrubs, such as bamboo, and many horticultural harvest by-products may be used. Some flowers are toxic and should not be handled, while others give off toxic fumes when boiled in preparation for the vat and should not be used. Please consult toxic plant resource materials and Public Health Services publications before harvesting. You may wish to consult with the department of botany at your local university, as well as pharmacology and toxicology regarding the plants you choose. Flowers and foliage to be dyed should be boiled in water for ten minutes. This initial boiling removes superficial ligneous matter, pectins, sugars and fugitive pigments, such as chlorophyll, and hydrates the flowers so that they are homogeneous with the hydrated fibers to which they will be added. For colorant either cold or hot water dyes may be used; if you use hot water dye, boil the flowers or plant parts in the dye. In either case, let them stand in the dye for one hour prior to adding salt and caustic setting solution. I use Createx Colors, Liquid Fiber Reactive, Cold Water Dye, Transparent (made by ColorCRAFT Ltd., Avon, CT), but any easily obtainable bulk dye will work. It is important to choose a colorant that is lightfast, washfast, permanent, and non-toxic. I add one ounce of salt per ten pounds of unsaturated flowers. Baking soda is used as a caustic to bond and set the dye, one ounce per ten pounds of unsaturated flowers. These proportions for salt and caustic can be varied as needed. The more caustic the setting solution is, the more intense the color will be. Let fresh-dyed flowers remain in dye-set solution for four to twelve hours, then wash and add them to the vat. I use one ounce of saturated dyed fresh flowers per three 18" x 24" sheets in a fifty gallon vat. If you are growing your own plants for bast fibers and dispersion aids, consider using the discards (leaves and flower petals) in your pigment experiments. Some plants respond better to pigments than others. The more desirable plants are those willing, when boiled, to drop their own transient pigment, and retain introduced pigments after a short exposure period. When preparing dried flowers for the vat, select those which are most supple, small and easily homogenized into the vat, then boil them and soak them in pure water, which should be changed every two hours. Washing is essential because dried flowers contain glycerin and alum. The alum carries particulate minerals to the surface of the paper where they oxidize during drying, giving the paper an unpredictable color. Soaking and washing diminish the glycerin and alum content in dried flowers which is discarded with the wash water. Powdered alum may be mixed with your water supply (one ounce per fifty gallons) and allowed to settle, carrying mineral impurities with it as it settles. This purified water may be syphoned off for the vat. The longer you soak your plant material the greater the degree of hydration. I sometimes soak boiled, dyed, and washed plant parts for up to twelve hours before adding them to the vat. Cautious observation is required, because over-soaking lessens buoyancy, a certain amount of which is desirable in order that the plant material will float and be exposed more fully to the surface of the sheet during sheet formation. A greater proportion of short to long fibers will also cast flower and plant parts toward the surface of the paper. Long fiber (1/2" to 1") has a tendency to knot around the plant parts, which interferes with sheet formation, whereas medium length fibers (1/4" to 1/2") will secure the flowers more permanently in place. Foliage reveals itself best when added to a vat of short fibers (1/16" to 1/8"), which are repelled, in the manner of a watermark, during sheet formation. However, a vat of exclusively short fibers will result in sheets with holes where the plant parts have repelled the short fiber, but have not been held in place by longer fibers. A vat of exclusively medium length bast fibers will find the addition of small plant parts extremely disruptive to proper sheet formation, especially if you are using a formation or dispersion aid, though the flowers will be held thoroughly secure under the medium fibers. Also, medium length fibers will obscure the plant parts. The ideal mix, then, is fifty percent medium length fiber, such as abace, and fifty percent short fiber, such as cotton linter. Perhaps a very small amount of an exotic long fiber could be included, multi-colored fribulated sisal, for example. I use two-thirds abaca and one-third half-stuff cotton in the vat. If you have access to translucent fibers, you should use them for the medium length fibers in place of abaca, which is too opaque when heavy weight paper is desired. A translucent bast fiber, such as daphne, will also render the foliage more visible, especially in combination with high yield, easily prepared plants such as those in the sunflower family or marigolds, which provide large quantities of petals per bloom and are most efficient. Vat water should be replaced with fresh pure water every thousand sheets, as ligneous matter, sugars, pectins and other foreign material introduced to the vat from the plant parts may alter the acid-alkaline balance, although this does not necessarily happen if the plants have been thoroughly boiled, soaked and washed. The vat should, however, be tested for neutral pH from time to time. Sizing may be used to help plant parts adhere to the fibers, but it is not always necessary. Where electrochemical bonding of the fibers causes them to repel foreign elements, such as gold leaf, it is useful to add corn starch sizing. Add six ounces of boiled corn starch to the amount of pulp to be used for fifty sheets of 18 x 24" paper. Be careful to boil the corn starch to a very fluid, translucent consistency by stirring one ounce of powdered corn starch into one quart of cold water. Shake this combination in a flask for one minute, after which stir it into one half gallon of boiling water, and continue to stir for five minutes. Mix this into pulp which has been hydrated for the vat, stirring until room temperature is reached. If left to stand aside from fiber, the boiled corn starch will harden into a solid mass, while diluting it into the prepared pulp and allowing it to cool slowly to room temperature assures even dispersion in the vat. While sizing adheres the plant parts to the fibers it also causes fibers to stick to each other and will seal one sheet to the next if you are couching your papers directly on top of each other. As a lamination aid this is desirable only when the double couched sheet is dried between pellon, cloth, or felts. Double couching for the purpose of holding flowers in place is not time-efficient, however. Sizing may also glue plant parts onto the drying surface if it has been heated. This is not desirable, nor is the alternatve of transferring the verso side of the paper from the post to a heated drying surface. Just as the comparative hydration of the flowers and fibers affects the respective velocity at which they move in the vat, when agitated, it also affects the drying time of the various components of the paper. Highly saturated foliage will be likely to retain water much longer than cellulose fibers. In order to prevent this difference from disturbing the surface of the sheet as it dries, it is important to allow thorough and rapid dehydration. I couch my sheets onto pellon-innerfacing, a non-absorbant, synthetic, plastic felt-type fabric manufactured for use in giving body to garments. Each pellon is then suspended and the sheets are air dried in a low humidity atmosphere. A brief pressing of the post prior to air drying is optional. I suggest 150 pounds of pressure for one minute. An alternative is to dry the paper on a solid or semi-solid drying surface. While this does not permit rapid dehydration, it will eliminate cockling as the various components dry at different rates. It is possible to dry the sheets face or flower side down by couching directly onto glass, metal, plastic or wood at room temperature, if the sheets have not been sized and if you are using only dried flowers. Heated porcelain and tin may be employed in specific cases. Discoloration may result from drying on a hard or heated surface, when particulate matter from the flowers leaches into the water in which they are suspended. This can leave oxidation deposits on the resultant sheets, especially if the drying process is lengthy. Plant residue is less likely to oxidize and salts are less likely to precipitate over a short period of time. Discoloration can be useful to achieve an antique finish but is generally undesirable. If you use this method of drying, I suggest you use only dried flowers thoroughly washed, as they are likely to contain fewer impurities than fresh dyed flowers. For the papermaker who chooses to make paper with embedded flowers and plant parts, the main goal should be to experiment with resources available to produce a cost efficient, decorative paper. Although the above suggestions may help avoid undesirable results, it is not the intention of these techniques to achieve archival quality products.
