Welcome to Fun with the Paper Mill with Arnold Grummer. Arnold Grummer is past curator of the Dard Hunter Paper Museum and author of two books on hand paper making. Today Mr. Grummer will be using the Paper Mill complete paper making kit and the Paper Mill Pro envelope and stationery kit. Both kits use the easy pour method to make paper and are available in sets for home or classroom use. Now here's Arnold Grummer. Hi! We're going to show you the basics steps for making a sheet of paper with my Paper Mill Pro and my Paper Mill kits. The first thing you need is some pulp. Now you can get new pulp or you can take pulp that has been used as paper. Any paper that you have or can find or can see can be recycled back into the pulp from which it was made. That is the best way to go. It's cheap, easy, and you have a bredth of choice that is beyond comprehension. So you take an eight and a half by eleven sheet. We're going to take three quarters of that eight and a half by eleven sheet and tear it up. This will give you a new sheet of about the same thickness, so if you wanted a sheet twice as thick, you'd use twice as much paper, half as thick, you'd use half as much paper. You've total control over how thick or thin your eventual sheet would be. But when you tear paper up, tear it into half, put the two halves together, keep doing that until you can't tear anymore. And that is the quickest way I know to reduce a sheet of paper to pieces large enough to be put into the blender. When you have it in the blender, add about two cups of water, as is told to you in the directions, and put the lid on and start the blender. Now if with you're blender you have a choice of several speeds, I would suggest one of the mid speeds. That seems to work the can best and the fastest. Also when you turn the blender on, the paper and the water jump up, so if you want to eliminate that, start your blender on a slower speed and let it run there for three or four seconds and then advance to the higher speed. Thirty seconds will take most any paper that you can find back to the pulp from which it was made. So there we are. We have pulp. Now, let's go to our hand mold and set it up and get it ready. Here we have the deckle. It's made by a cabinet maker out of wood intended to be in water. From the kit, take the white paper making screen put it on top like that. Your paper making screen, by the way, is the best that's available. It's the same screen used on a two hundred and fifty million dollar paper machine. There's nothing better. Then from the kit, you take the support grid, put that on top of the screen, take the fastening straps, pull them tightly over the grid and fix them there in the front in that fashion and your kit, your hand mold in this case, is ready to go. That you take and put into water. I would suggest you drop it in on its edge like that and then slowly drop it down flat. Into the hand mold goes the pulp. Now it's important to get the pulp evenly distributed because as evenly distributed as it is above the screen, that's how evenly it's going to be distributed on the screen when you lift this up so you get it evenly distributed with a little bit of turbulence with your fingers and that's all there is to it. Now you lift it up and out of the water, and hold it level while it drains. So anybody regardless of their age who can lift this out of the water and hold it level will make a perfect sheet the first time they try. That is utterly amazing. So there you are, a very lovely sheet indeed. Now let's remove the sheet from the hand mold. We will set it right here. Pull the straps down in that fashion and lift the deckle. Sometimes the screen comes up with the deckle. If that happens, you simply take a thumb or something and pull the screen down so there's no problem there. Then we will put it over here and we're ready for water removal. We take from the kit a cover screen, which is a window screen, place that on there like that, and take the sponge, also from the kit, and remove water. This is very simple easy way to do it. Nothing can wear out. The directions are not difficult, so it's an ideal step for water removal which is a big part of hand paper making. When you do this, don't use the sponge in this fashion because you'll never get much water out even over a long period of time. Take your sponge to put it down like that. A hand and that there, a hand there, push down and let up immediately because water does not come out until you let up. That is efficient fast and will remove a lot of water in a very short time. When you have removed all of the water possible with the sponge, carefully lift one corner of the water removal screen and pull it back like that. Do not lift it rapidly like that because this may come up with that, drop back and your sheet would be ruined. When you have that like that we can take a screen off, place it over here, and on top of the mat of wet fibers, put a couch sheet like that. Turn it over so that the screen is looking up at you and the couch sheet is down on the surface, take your sponge and apply pressure. This will cause the mat of wet fibers to leave the screen and migrate to the couch sheet. The couch sheet by the way gets damp. You dry it, you reuse it, if you're careful it will last indefinitely. Now when you have done that carefully lift one corner and see whether or not the mat of wet fibers has migrated from the paper making screen to the couch sheet here it has. If it didn't do it at that corner you try all other four corners and see if it works there if that still doesn't work apply more pressure try it again if that still doesn't work ultimately you can take a thumbnail or something tease the sheet off the screen onto the couch sheet and then if you peel carefully like this you'll have no problem and there is the transfer Now we press how you press this the fibers don't really care you can put a board on it stand on it put a rock on it or whatever in the kit you'll find a press bar that is two milk jugs recycled very hard indeed and excellent for a press bar and you lean on it as hard as you can and you'll be removing water because of the efficiency of the couch sheets that we have put into the kit when you have done that you can carefully remove the top couch sheet and put that aside and again you let it dry and use it again. Now because paper gets stronger as water is removed the little individual bonds grow in strength you probably can remove this sheet from the couch sheet and you are ready for the final drying Now if you want your sheet right away you have no choice but to dry with heat you can turn most irons up to their maximum heat and put it down on the wet mat of fibers and dry so let's do that here you can see that it will work very well you will see the sheet getting more light as it dries and of course the other way to dry a sheet is to put it under heavy pressure between dry couch sheets now the difference is this if you put it under sufficient pressure this sheet has to dry uniformly if it dries uniformly it's going to shrink uniformly and you have a very nice smooth sheet but that can take up to sixteen seventeen hours if you use heat as we're using it here it is not going to dry uniformly because obviously where I have the iron it's drying and shrinking there while not shrinking and drying at other places so you simply try to dry it as uniformly as you can because the sheet gets lighter as you do this you can see about where it is most dry and where it needs a little bit more heat and it will curl a little bit that is due to the uneven shrinkage that occurs as you dry it with heat and there you can see little curl but that is not fatal and it is not difficult really to get a very nice sheet even though that happens. If you take the iron and if this is curl here I can lean a little bit on this edge lift against the curl in that fashion and in that way counteract what the shrinkage forces had done in the first place well the final point is that you can come up with a very adequate sheet upon which you can write type draw or with which you can wrap by drying with heat and it does deliver your sheet right away so let's see what we have here. There is the sheet that we have recycled. There is the snap and crackle, and you can indeed type, write, draw on it, or wrap with it.