Just flowers then. And the shine off the back of a dragonfly. I wanted a piece of the moon, but blue-dragonfly-shine was as close as I could get.

Or, Adventures With Silk Paper.

So, the theory behind silk (well, I used bamboo fiber that I dyed, but the principle is the same) paper is that you sandwich some fiber between netting, wet it, squish fabric medium through it, and let it dry. (There are various other things you can use to stick it together, depending on the specific properties you want out of it, but fabric medium works as well as anything else.) Anyway, here's the process:

Take your fiber and start laying it out on the netting (you should also put plastic underneath so that you don't get fabric medium everywhere). For extra strength, do multiple layers with the grain at right angles to adjacent layers.

The fiber I dyed wasn't particularly smooth, so it was hard to just pull out nice even tufts. I ended up taking smaller segments and spreading them apart. It ended up getting me rather uneven paper, but it has an interesting texture.

All done with that step.

Now fold over the netting, or lay another piece on top, or whatever you need to do to get both sides covered.


Now you need to wet out the fiber to make it easier for the fabric medium to work all the way through. Get your soapy water ready (something like 1t/cup works fairly well).


Start working it through the fiber. The fiber has to be completely saturated; it takes more water than you think.

Next, peel back your top layer of netting and sort of brush the loose fibers back toward the center to make a "selvedge"; it makes it much easier to get out of the netting later.

Ready for fabric medium.

At first I was brushing it on, but eventually I decided to just dump it on. (This was fairly heavy paper, so it took a lot.)

Squish it in with your hands if you like!

Yeah, there will be suds; you just soaked the whole thing in soapy water, it'll do that.

Then hang it up to dry (ok, it would probably be better for the fiber to not hang it in direct sunlight, but I felt like living dangerously.)

Ironing to heat-set the fabric medium. Check the label on whatever sort of glue stuff you're using to see if you need to do this.

And there it is! This was three fairly heavy layers of fiber, and it came out more like a felt than anything else.



After that, I decided to try experimenting with making the lightest possible paper I could. This is what I ended up with! It's surprisingly sturdy. I could see using it in place of organza for some projects.



You can't see the shimmer very well in this photo :(