Rainbows in Lockdown

 It has been over a year since I last posted and one of the first things I said I'd do was to update my website, sorry that hasn't happened yet and I've had three months!!!
I'm posting this here as an addition to the Papermakers of Victoria magazine The Deckle Edge. I wrote an article about making some rainbow paper but there wasn't room for all the images so here is the article with all the images:-

Rainbows and light

When Anne Pitkethly threw out the challenge to put a paper rainbow in my window I accepted and broke up a batch of recycled letterpress paper into five lots. I dyed them red, yellow, green, blue and purple. I made my rainbow on a mould by pouring the pulp and couching onto a readymade sheet of paper. I then had lots of coloured pulp left over and I made some sheets with a watermark of my old school motto ‘Respice Lucem’ that means ‘Look to the light’. I already had the text cut out of waterproof cloth tape and stuck to fibreglass fly screen that fits on a mould the right size to fit one of the small lamps from IKEA. 

I needed an A3 sized vat for those sheets and was able to pull two of each colour before I drained the vat and started again with the next colour. I have put the watermarked sheets in my window along with my teddy bear and my pulp painted rainbow. I can read look to the light from the inside it could be interesting to see how lightfast the dyes are.

After emptying the vats I still had quite a bit of the coloured pulp left so thought I’d try some pulp marbling. I first learned about this technique from Christine Ballinger at the IAPMA Congress in Adelaide in 1998 and had only used it once before when I was doing a lot of floral pulp paintings and I made a vase using the technique.  What you need is formation aid and although I haven’t tried it you might be able to use okra or prickly pear. Have water and formation aid in a vat deep enough to cover the mesh of your mould but not so deep that it covers the deckle.

Weigh down the deckle so that it doesn’t float off. Mix some formation aid and water with your pulp so that it has the consistency of pouring cream; use a sauce bottle, turkey baster or slip trailer (ceramic tool) to pour the pulp onto the mould.

Once you have coverage you can use a skewer to move the pulp around.  

When happy with the result couch the sheet, then to support it couch another sheet on top or do as I did and couch onto a readymade sheet.

The dry sheet