A couple of weeks ago I was at the paper arts studio with a friend to check and replenish our supply of paper pulp in preparation for a beginners workshop.

There was no plant fibre pulp but we found a bucket with some unidentified plant fibre soaking, ready for the beater. It was incredibly fibrous so we thought the Hollander beater would make a good job of macerating it and after about an hour – or a bit less – we would have some excellent pulp to decant into buckets ready to use.

Once the beater was operational we started pulling the wet fibres apart and dropping them into the water.

After three minutes Dinah could see it had broken down enormously. We checked the operational part (under the guard) and found some lumps which we pulled apart and then turned the machine back on. Dinah has a lot of experience, knows what the machine should sound like when it is working and can tell when the pulping process is complete. She only ran the beater for another minute before we rechecked the contents. To our utter amazement the fibres had totally disintegrated to virtually nothing.

You can see from the image below left that there was nothing remaining to create paper sheets. It was bizarre and neither of us had seen this happen before.

To ‘rescue’ the fibre we drained some liquid off and added white cotton paper pulp and ran the beater for about a minute to combine them. From the image above right you can see this was a success and we achieved a great looking pulp with tiny darker flecks throughout.

On Saturday we used quite a bit of it during our paper making class and the results look terrific.

I’ll be back there in a couple of weeks to use it to make paper for myself. This was a lesson for our students, showing them that if things don’t work out first time there’s always a solution – you just have to find it.