How to Make Handmade Floral Paper
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Dear Reader,
I am so excited to share a new craft with you that I have been learning more about, which is the art of paper making. Winter is the perfect season to learn new home crafts, don’t you think? There is less of a need to be outdoors, tending to the garden or meandering about the landscape. Instead, I love to find new ways to occupy my hands, and this allows my mind to wander and imagine new ideas. Making handmade paper is an incredibly easy task. All you need is one new tool to make your own paper at home: a paper screen! After that, it’s an incredibly creative individual process and the ideas become endless. I absolutely love how this handmade paper with flowers in it turned out!
can anyone make handmade paper?
Yes, making paper at home is for anyone! In fact, it’s a very resourceful craft because you are recycling old pieces of paper to create something new. It makes me rather excited to begin this journey because I personally go through quite a bit of paper with making lists and writing down ideas.
supplies for making handmade paper:
Scrap Paper, Egg Cartons, Newspaper, Thin Cardboard. You can use pretty much any paper medium to make handmade paper. You will want to experiment a bit. I recommend using old egg cartons, the kind made out of a cardboard-like material, because it’s the perfect thickness to experiment as a beginner. The thinner the paper, the harder it is to work with. If you use something thick like cardboard boxes, you might have a hard time blending it up.
Water. The second “ingredient” for making handmade paper is water! Read on to learn more.
Blender or Food Processor. You’ll want to make sure you clean your blender well after using it to make paper!
Large Bowl or Tub. A plastic storage tote works great for making paper or one of those plastic washing tubs for restaurants!
Paper Screen. To make paper, the new tool you will most likely need to purchase is a paper screen. This screen is extremely fine, kind of like a butterfly net, with allows water to flow through but not the paper pulp.
Towels. You will need towels to dry out the paper.
Dried Flowers. If you would like to add a touch of whimsy to your paper, you can add little bits of dried flowers to it! You will want them to be more flat than obtuse so that they lay nicely in the paper.
step one:
Begin by gathering your paper of choice! For this tutorial, I used scrap paper from our various paper crafts that we make. These designs were printed on cardstock. As you will see at the end, the printing really did not affect the final color of the paper!
Rip the pieces of paper into smaller pieces, about 2 to 3-inches (5 to 8-cm) in size. Then, place your paper into a blender or food processor.
step two:
Once the paper is in your food processor, you will want to cover it with warm water. How much paper and how much water, you ask? Well, it’s really going to depend on how much you have! I have found that it works best if I use a 1:3 ratio, 1 part paper to 1 part water. You could also fill your blender about 1/3 of the way full of paper scraps and then cover the rest with water.
Blend the paper on high speed until it looks like oatmeal. There should not be large hunks of paper left and everything should be uniform. You are creating a new paper pulp from the old paper!
Once the paper is blended, pour the pulp into your large bowl or tub. Then, add more warm water to the tub, about the same amount that you use to blend with the paper. The amount of water that you use will determine the final thickness of your paper.
Finally, sprinkle in your dried flowers.
step three:
With your paper screen closed, dip the entire screen into the paper pulp. You will want the side of the screen that opens to be facing up.
Gently lift the screen up out of the pulp, letting the pulp and flowers that you lifted onto the screen settle naturally into place. This is really where you can become as creative as you like with the paper. Because the pulp is so fine and wet, you can’t really move it around with your fingers or you will disturb the fibers, and they won’t weave together.
Instead, you have to swirl the pulp around in the water and take a chance at lifting the screen wherever the pulp ends up. That means you will get a unique piece of paper each and every time!
step four:
Let as much water as possible drip from the paper screen and back into the bowl. The paper will still be very wet, but it should not have pools of water sitting on top of the surface. Try your best not to move the pulp around with your fingers. Carefully open the screen to expose the paper.
On a clean towel (a bath towel works best) or several layers of paper towels, flip the screen over so that the surface of the paper is touching the towel. With another thick towel or more paper towels, dab at the back of the paper screen to soak up as much water as possible.
Note: Whatever type of material that you use to dry your paper on will leave an imprint in the surface of the paper. This is what gives homemade paper its textured appearance!
step five:
Once most of the liquid has been soaked up, you should be safe to lift the paper screen. The paper will stick to the surface of the towel and the screen should lift very easily. Once this happens, gently soak up anymore moisture without ribbing apart the fibers.
Then, very carefully, lift the corners of the paper and peel it off of the towel. Your paper is finished!
Lay the final piece of paper onto a wire cooling rack for cooking and allow it to dry out completely, about 24 hours.
Repeat this process until you have used up all of your paper pulp.
tips for making homemade paper:
Don’t leave the pulp alone for too long. One thing I have learned while making homemade paper is that the pulp really does not settle well overnight. I thought that I might be able to leave a tub full of pulp overnight so that I could come back to it the next day, and it became rather stinky and discolored. If you are going to make paper, try to keep the batches small if you don’t have a lot of time to spend making it!
Paper towels work better. While I love the romantic look of using towels, and the more sustainable aspect of them too, drying out your sheets of homemade paper just works better with paper towels. However, then you are left with a bunch of wet and useless paper towels. Unless you decide to make them into more paper! It’s really kind of backwards, so if you don’t want to waste a bunch of paper towels, a bath towel is your next best option.
final thoughts:
This was a really fun and simple craft to make! It was so fun to learn how to make homemade floral paper. These are flowers that I grew and dried from my garden last year, and I love that I get to preserve them in this beautiful way. Making your own paper at home is a wonderful way to incorporate your uniqueness and creativity into a gift. These handmade floral papers make excellent bases for cards and letters. They smell lovely, too!
Handmade floral paper is the perfect whimsical craft for any romantic fantasy lover!
xoxo Kayla
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