Friday, 23 June 2017

Busy Bee - paper making, with seeds!


Busy Bee was a brief that I wrote myself for my final major project at university in my final year. I’ve posted about this on Instagram and on its on my website too. I decided to tackle the issue of helping honey bees in the UK and growing more flowers.

From my website: ‘Busy Bee is a campaign to encourage busy commuters to grow flowers on their daily commute to help the honey bee population. The handmade paper made from recycled train tickets and specially chosen seeds for honey bees was transformed into coffee cup wraps, posters and an information booklet; all of which can be grown. All products were screen printed and would use environmentally friendly ink.
The campaign would rely on commuters handing in their old train tickets to coffee shops that supported Busy Bee and would in turn get a coffee cup wrap. The website design for mobile would allow users to locate the nearest coffee shop.’

More about the background and research for this project can be found on my website here.

The paper making process
I’m a hoarder. I hoard things. Things I don’t want to throw away, things people have given me, things I have picked up when I’ve gone somewhere, nice things, old receipts and tickets, scrap bits of paper I can't bare throw away ect. So I have a whole bag for life of paper from my 3 years at uni that I thought might come in use one day. And I made sure I was going to use it, especially for this project. I’ve always been intrigued by paper making since I created the Upcycle project at college and wanted to create some of my own. I remember one summer 3-4 years ago I spent ages going from shop to shop trying to find mesh to make a frame that my dad said he would help put together but I had no luck finding the correct mesh I needed. Until later on, I gave up and bought an A5 mesh from ebay. And its been perfectly fine (no idea why I didn't do that first). The only problem I found was joining the sheets together to make A4 or A3 sheets of paper.

Here are pictures from the process. Not all of the photos are form the same batch and some are from different days. I really didn't want to get water or paper pulp on my camera!
Last December I collect a whole loads of petals from flowers we were about to throw away. Dried them out and kept them in plastic bags. This is a picture of some of them in the blender.

I don’t have correct measurements of how much water I added, or starch, or seeds or the amount paper. I did them all in the different batches, added them to a tub and added extra water if needed. Here is a picture of all the train tickets I added to the mixture. I blended until only for a few seconds, if the water is warm it breaks the paper down quicker and you don’t want the paper to be too fine else it will pass through the mesh.

 

 
I added at least 3 batches of paper and water to a tub and added extra water if the mixture was too thick. Once I had the right consistency, I added starch and seeds. I had chosen specific seeds to attract bees so that it related to purpose of my project. The starch makes the paper stronger and this is exactly what I needed as I was going to make booklets, coffee cup wraps and posters.

I then dipped the frame into the water, slowly lifted it up and let the water drain on the side. I then pressed the pulp down with a sponge until most of the water was gone and carefully place the pulp square onto plastic and cardboard to dry.

It took at least 2-3 days to dry properly.

I have some spare paper left so I will test this outdoors over the summer. The small plant pot I tests out a sample of died within a few days, simple because I don’t have much sunlight in my room and where my window is positioned.
Also in the picture above...that's not soil...its tea! From used teabags (that's another story in itself).

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