Making Japanese Paper

This semester I was taking a short 5-week class on Japanese Papermaking. Here are some of the shots of this process:






This is the plant fiber called Kozo that has been boiled and will eventually turn into paper.












Here I have beaten the Kozo for 30 minutes to break up all the fibers and make them manageable.









This container is called the vat it is filled mostly with water and the small Kozo fibers. I have thrown in some longer fibers in the mix to create dimension. The square object to the right is the mold for making the paper, it gets dipped into the vat and sheets of paper are formed.









Finally, the wet sheets are layered and sandwiched between sheets of plywood. It then gets pressed together to squeeze all the water out and laid out to dry overnight.