This Alabama yucca/cotton paper sample was made in the studio of Doug Baulos at The University of Alabama, Birmingham and in the Lost Arch Paper Mill at The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.

To complement the paper sample on the left side of this spread, I searched for fibers to compare with Mexican maguey and found a yucca species native to Alabama, Yucca flaccida, growing in my backyard in Tuscaloosa. Although yucca is not an agave, it is in the same subfamily (Agavoideae) and shares similar characteristics. Sustainability was an important goal for this project, given the ecological ethics of both Alberto Valenzuela, the lead papermaker at Taller Papel Oaxaca, and Doug Baulos. Yucca grows plentifully in urban environments, making it more sustainable to harvest than our less-common native agave.

I harvested 8 pounds of fresh yucca leaves and water retted them for 1 month. I then cooked the retted leaves with lye for 8 hours, rinsed thoroughly, and cut them into 1-inch pieces. I neutralized the lye water with white vinegar before disposal.

Doug and I beat the fiber for about 1 hour in a Reina beater, adding about 5-percent recycled paper from raw Sea Island Brown cotton grown in Tuscaloosa and cotton rag paper. Likely because of a mixture of lye residue and the saponins that naturally occur in yucca, the fiber bubbled up in the beater and was eventually unmanageable. We solved this problem by twice washing small amounts in the beater and draining. We ran the fiber in the beater for another 30 minutes at the 5 setting until it achieved a consistent, almost watery texture. Separately I beat 100-percent-cotton white jeans and added 5 to 7 percent of the cotton pulp to the yucca/cotton mixture, bringing the overall cotton content to between 10 and 12 percent, similar to the maguey/cotton samples from Papel Oaxaca. No sizing was added.

I formed thin sheets Western-style using 11 x 14-inch moulds. After pressing the sheets in a hydraulic press, I dried them under restraint at the Lost Arch Paper Mill in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The resulting text-weight paper has a slightly softer feel than the paper from Papel Oaxaca with fewer visible fibers, and is appropriate or printing and text blocks.

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