PaperMaking from Plants:
CATTAIL HEAD PAPER

Gin Petty suggested trying this wonderful brown pulp made of just the heads, the brown cigars of cattails.

I love the near leather look of it, that highly textured surface is just wonderful for certain applications and the sheets are light as a feather. What a find! The wet pulp is both fluffy and gelatinous, beautiful in its deeply ruddy brown. And it is so ---prodigious? High yield. big payoff for minimal effort.Cooked in a soda ash solution until tender, and blendered until pulp.



Cattail head background sheet, and sheet-cast head; Jerusalem artichoke horizontal sheet and ragweed/rose/lillystem/cotton llnter vertical sheet and paper beads.

Saturday, mid September as summer slips toward autumn, I drove 2 minutes further along route 225 than I had been before---- through a town called Caton and saw a road with a sign for the Steuben County Department of Public Works, having passed a Green Brae (?Bay Area town on stilts) type scene -- a raised, white washed clapboard building with a wooden walkway named Marshland Gallery (or something like that)- country picture glorious-- and beyond it a body of water like a small low lake in an abandoned field at the base of a hill rise.






The other end of this marsh, just before the Public Works Station was a field of cattails-- the vegetation included crown vetch and Queen Anne's Lace by the road's edge, but there they were-- from the marsh to the road and on the other side of the road, deceptively close.

Something warned me, I stepped carefully and though the tight headed cattails waved just within or just beyond arm's reach, they were all 18" to 3 feet below the road level--- all the vegetation obscured this.



I'm enamored of a new plant site if you want pictures of the plant and information on its habitat try:http://plants.usda.gov/

Kingdom Plantae ­ Plants

Subkingdom - Tracheobionta ­ Vascular plants

Superdivision - Spermatophyta - Seed plants

Division - Magnoliophyta - Flowering plants

Class - Liliopsida - Monocotyledons

Subclass - Commelinidae

Order - Typhales

Family - Typhaceae -Cat-tail family

Genus - Typha L.-cattail

Species - Typha latifolia L. -broadleaf cattail

i'm following Gin's example (plant documenter extraordinare, access her journal here)Thanks to Gin and the papermaking list folks for reawakening me to the possibilities right outside my door.



Pulp on, people!



On Casting| On the Critter| Making Big Paper|Sources on the Net|Creators on the Net|Mail Order|Reading|Making Paper Overview|Paper Bowls|Mold Making| Hand Papermaking WebRing| Making Paper From Hostas and Teasels|Dandelions and Green PaperMaking|Dracaena Paper|Carrot Paper|Burdock Paper|Timothy Paper|Queen Anne's Lace Paper| Teasel Top Paper |Jerusalem Artichoke Leaf Paper




Birdhouse 2 2002, handmade paper, flameworked glass beads, copper Akua Lezli Hope,