Lorrie Grainger: ...blog here Each year she goes into her kids' classrooms and makes paper with the students. Each station is a large black vat with a smaller dishpan size vat inside. The smaller vat holds the pulp while the larger vat catches spills and holds the mould and deckle (when not in use) and a sponge. This set up significantly cuts down on mess. I had four stations for this group.


The girls are pulling a sheet of blue paper with confetti paper/glitter inclusions. ...we used boards as our drying method. While the boards are a bit awkward to carry to/from school, I most definitely prefer this route. The kids can also press objects into the wet pulp and add interesting textures to the sheet.

After the paper was dry, I went back into the classroom to help the kids bind their books. The title page of each book is "I love you because..." Some books had only a couple of pages and some have as many as eight. From what I saw, all the books were great and the moms will be pleased.

The main challenge for me...equipment is disorganized...Having to look for what I need...lug it upstairs for transport is becoming a bigger job than I like. ...my hope is to get a small grant ...a bigger papermaking installation project.

other comments...
in order to explore various hand altering techniques with photography I vowed that I would use one of my own photos in each book that I work in. Ironically, when hand altering a photo, it is often the bad photos that work best. That's because the altering makes the photo more interesting.

After taking more than a year off from my art (just didn't have it in me any more), I began experimenting with a series of mosaics to sell for the Children's Hearts Fund fundraiser.