Making hand made paper

 Last week a local crafting friend Petra invited me and another friend, Pat, around for a paper making session - she's made it before but the other two of us were absolute novices. It's really all about recycling old paper into new, and is far easier than I expected! 

Petra already had the equipment we needed  and had prepared ahead by saving all the junk mail that had come into her home, sorting it by colour then tearing it into tiny pieces and soaking it in lots of water, ready to whizz up in the blender when the paper making was about to begin. 

Then we had to dip a fine mesh screen into the wet pulp and pick up a layer of it, drain it and dry it. The drying process takes several days, so I only got to play with the paper I made this weekend. 

We experimented with different inclusions - glitter, coffee grounds, tiny unsoaked scraps of paper and flower petals. 

    

My favourite of the papers is the coffee grounds paper, which has a faint scent of coffee. It is sturdy enough to dry emboss or die cut, and you'll be seeing a lot of it on her in coming weeks. But for the first make, I chose the little square-ish piece of pink paper. 

As soon as I took this off the mesh I knew exactly what I was going to do with it! You can't see from the photo, but there is actually very fine silver glitter embedded into the paper and it just cried out to be used as a background for a sparkly silver snowflake. I didn't trim the paper at all, because I didn't want to waste a scrap, and because I thought the uneven edges make a perfect contrast for the bold, plain look of my snowflake. A simple stamped sentiment kept it CAS despite the handmade paper. 

I am sharing this with 

Crafty Hazelnut's Christmas Challenge - Anything goes/use some patterned paper  

Less is More - Sparkle 

Jingle Belles - Tic Tac Toe  (I've used the diagonal line Glitter/Die Cuts/Stamping)