Plants and clothes turned into paper

A small crop of blue-flowering Irish linen and even an old cotton shirt have been turned into coarse paper at Willow Bank Heritage Village near Wakefield and the plan is to make ink to write on the paper.

Christine Grieder says the village was able to get hold of a Hollander beater which is a machine developed centuries ago by the Dutch to produce paper pulp from plant fibers.

“We have one printing press from 1905 and the printing museum in Wellington are selling us another, so we thought, why not make the paper?”

As well as the plant material and her husband’s old cotton shirt cut up, pulped and turned into paper, she has cut up linen material and mixed with a few ingredients before chucking it in the Hollander beater to do its work.

It’s a step up from her first attempt at making paper using her kitchen blender, which she doesn’t recommend.

The linen plant was boiled in a wood-fired copper with baking soda and wood ash and one of the next projects will be including pressed flowers in the handmade paper.

“We want to make paper with children when they visit. The plan is to have a writing desk with handmade paper and make our own ink so people can write on the paper. It takes them back to simpler times.”

Paper and printing takes place in the tiny building with ‘The Colonist’ banner at the village, which was the name of one of Nelson’s earliest newspapers that was published between 1857 and 1920.