Making a poetry book out of nettles
Practice Research Diary #2
This post will document my venture into turning the mighty and versatile stinging nettle into some hopefully passable seed paper and cordage that I will attempt to turn into a growing book. This was a largely improvised process based off of watching a lot of youtube videos and my experience with making recycled paper last year.
On the 11th May, I began where any good project begins: in the park with my beloved dog, Bollo. I collected a large handful of nettles from a few places, making sure to scrape off any slimy snail friends. Returning home with a hearty hoard and a few stings, I separated the leaves from the stalks. The stalks I put in the garage and stomped on following Sally Pointer’s ‘minimum effort’ method. I did try to cut up the leaves with scissors but it was fiddly and hard and I chopped of the tip off my Mum’s rubber gloves almost immediately, so I stopped. I put them in a pan, poured over some boiling water and left them to steep while I went out for coffee with sweet Daniel.
The next day I decided that half an hour before I was supposed to leave the house was a good time to do some more prep for the paper (spoiler alert: it was chaos). I completed the grueling task of separating the leaves from any leftover stems and chopping them up into little bits with scissors. Once I'd filled up a jar I wanted to see how it would blend... It was so easy that I decided to blend up my other jar of stems too. Now I had two jars of pulp, I thought it wouldn't hurt to ever-so-quickly try and pull a few sheets. I set down my plastic tub, which was not much smaller than the size of my kitchen, a black sack to protect to carpet, a towel over the top and an old tshirt to flop the paper onto. It did not work.
Every sheet I pulled stuck perfectly unbroken to my mold and deckle. Every attempt felt like it would be the one and yet it just would not transfer off the deckle. Even reddit could not help me. It was an hour past the time I was supposed to leave and I was no closer to pulling a sheet. Now everything was set up I felt unable to leave untill I had cracked it. I watched a few YouTube videos to see what other people were doing, and I also added a small about of paper pulp to up the fiber- specifically old cyanotypes of my poetry. I scrapped the towel, found a few fresh and DRY tshirts and decided try once more. This time it worked. In conclusion, having something highly absorbent and wet underneath an already wet tshirt will mess up you paper making. Now I make paper on dry cotton tshirts with no towels underneath and I have fewer problems.
I sprinkled in some cress seeds, pulled a few more sheets, left them hanging to dry and ran out the house a mere 2.5hours late. Success.
About a week later, I remembered I had left some stomped on nettle stems on the floor of the garage. I was running out of time for the project so I stripped off as much fibre as I could and used it to haphazardly bind my book. It was not as neat as I was picturing but it did the job. This project (which you can read about here), was about the concept more than anything.
So it worked! I was able to make a book out of nettles from my local park- the park which inspired the poetry that was then written onto it. The book, which I watered everyday, grew a dense crop of cress which I happily nibbled. I cannot describe how incredible the smell of the wet paper was. Here’s the finished product:
