Sometimes I make paper because I have a particular project in mind. And sometimes I make paper simply because I wonder, what would happen if I tried this?
This was one of those times.
I had two vats of recycled pulp, one white and one a deep blue, and I started wondering if I could make a single sheet using both colors. Not by mixing them together, but by letting each color have its own space on the sheet.
So I tried it.
I dipped half of my mould into the white pulp and pulled it out of the vat. Instead of couching the sheet, I turned to the blue vat and dipped the other half of the mould into that.
There was no measuring and certainly no attempt at getting a perfectly straight line down the middle. I just wanted to see what the two pulps would do when they met.
And that turned out to be the part I liked best.
Because both pulps were wet, the blue and white didn’t meet in a hard, perfect line. The fibers wandered into each other. The blue softened as it moved toward the white, and the white picked up little traces of blue.
Honestly, that blur is the best part. It looks intentional even though it is really just wet fiber doing what wet fiber does.
Then I pressed and couched the sheet as I normally would and did it again.
And again.
Of course, no two sheets came out quite the same.
On some, the blue traveled farther across the page. On others, the white took over. Sometimes the meeting point landed almost in the middle and sometimes it didn’t. The deckle edges remained wonderfully uneven, and every sheet had its own version of that blue-to-white transition.
I could probably work very hard at making them all match.
But why?
One of the things I love about handmade paper is that it doesn’t have to be perfect. In fact, I don’t really want it to be. The little variations are evidence that it was made by hand, one sheet at a time.
There is also something particularly satisfying about doing this with recycled pulp. These are fibers that have already had one life, perhaps more than one. Scraps left from another project, bits that could easily have been thrown away, can go back into the vat and become something completely different.
And sometimes all it takes is two vats and a little curiosity.
I had no particular use in mind for these sheets when I started. I just wanted to see if I could do it.
Now, of course, I’m looking at that stack of blue and white paper and wondering what I can make with it.
That’s usually how one experiment becomes another.