Paste Grain Paper experiment

Sally Hutson, fellow CQ member led a workshop for the Weedon Bec Creative Textiles Group this month on creating Paste Grain Papers. I confess to never having heard of them before this. It is an ancient method of producing highly decorative papers for bookbinding, box covering etc. We were able to sample Potato, rice and gram flour pastes. Each producing slightly different granular textures on papers.

The pastes were coloured by the addition of acrylic paint.

This was then painted over the surface of the paper and, quickly, before the paint-paste mixture dried, a range of implements were "drawn"across the surface creating patterns with an element of 3D to them. We each had a range of different papers that we brought along and we managed to entertain ourselves for the rest of the day experimenting with the technique.

The effects were much greater when we were able to add a second or third paint layers by letting each one dry before adding a new layer.

We filled a large hall by lunchtime!

Here are a selection of the pieces the group produced.

I worked in a narrow colour range so that all my papers would work together, not because I had an end product in mind, more that I likes the idea of toning pieces!

Here is my collection:

With the piece on the bottom right I decided to screw it up to creates a much softer piece of paper. This worked because I had used a piece of vinyl wallpaper which was much stronger. This piece was then covered with Acrylic Wax, which was rubbed in. This gave me a piece with the texture of leather which I can now stitch into.

The one above was worked on a piece of Egyptian cotton! It's very stiff now it's dry so I need to experiment to see what stitching does to it!

I can see me using these as frontispieces for smaller sketch books for instance.

I really enjoyed the experiment and look forward to trying out stitching on the paste grained fabric, if that works, who knows where it might lead!