Grow Your Own Paper : Recipes for Creating Unique Handmade Papers [Paperback]

Maureen Richardson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1999

A range of beautiful handmade papers awaits you--just open the door to your backyard! Draw on nature's plentiful (and inexpensive) sources to create beautifully embellished handmade papers, using this practical and inspirational book as your guide. Learn how easy it is to cultivate, harvest, and prepare all-natural materials to make striking papers for use in a range of projects, from collages and greeting cards to subtly textured writing paper. Discover:

* More than 100 recipes for creating a multitude of exquisite papers, using fresh and pressed flowers, petals, seeds, leaves, ferns, grasses, and herbs

* Directions for customizing papers with watermarks and embossing, plus tips on making more complex papers with cooked fibers

* Special instructions for creating wonderfully scented potpourri papers

* Basic papermaking techniques, explained in easy to follow step-by-step directions

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A wonderful handbook for beginners, Grow Your Own Paper overflows with beautiful photos of papers speckled with flowers, leaves, and seeds. With a blender, a mold, and a few other basic materials, crafters can transform harvests from the garden (or the craft store) into lovely handmade papers. (Even a trip to the grocery store can yield papermaking supplies: apples, bananas, corncob silk, parsley, and tea leaves all make nice papers.) Maureen Richardson offers very general guidelines on growing and gathering the botanicals, as well as a rundown of basic papermaking techniques. Each of the 50 recipes refers directly to these basic methods, so they're essentially all variations on a few themes, yet they result in many different looks. --Amy Handy

Review

Over 50 recipes for creating papers...Photography is inspiring and gives a good idea of how the finished product can look. -- Textile Fibre Forum, January 2000

Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: Martingale and Company; First Edition edition (October 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1564772802
• ISBN-13: 978-1564772800
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 8.6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,725,489 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars For beginning hobby papermakers, April 12, 2000

By 

Finola Prescott (Barbados) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Grow Your Own Paper : Recipes for Creating Unique Handmade Papers (Paperback)

Grow Your Own Paper is full of beautiful pictures of decorative papers made with plant inclusions and plants - which are of themselves, wonderfully inspiring even to someone who regularly makes pretty plant papers. What it is not full of is detailed papermaking info. As far as I can tell, beating methods are limited only to using a blender which leaves out the wonderful low tech method of handbeating, and no time is given to more advanced methods such as using a Hollander. However it does give a good quick description of how to make wood ash alkali solution as well as a good variety of drying techniques with their results - the best I've seen so far. But my overall feeling is that if you want to understand much about the processes that make paper, it lacks depth. A pretty book. and if you're just starting out, it would give you lots of inspiration for using flora, but for people who already know anything about papermaking, expect the high point to be the photos and if you want a much more detailed and useful guide to growing, harvesting and using plants to make paper and a truly broad range of info on equipment and techniques, get "Papermaking with Plants" Helen Heibert

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of my favorites!, March 20, 2001

By 

Jeana M. Johnson (Bemidji, MN USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Grow Your Own Paper : Recipes for Creating Unique Handmade Papers (Paperback)

I loved this book! It is one of the best that I have. Even though it only covers a small portion of the wide world of papermaking it does it very well. It is a great book for the beginning papermaker that is starting out in the kitchen.