How to make your own paper! Video

My name is Dina Leaven and we are gonna do a trash to craft project. Today, we are going to take your junk mail and your bills and make them beautiful. We're gonna make paper and all you need are a few simple things: You need a place where you can actually strain your pulp, a blender, and a drying/draining area. So, first, I'm going to actually rip some of my bills and your junk mail, whatever paper you have laying around the house. You're gonna pour some water into the blender, and then you blend. So depending on how thick you want your paper, your blending times will vary so I'm just gonna pour it into my bin. You're gonna take your screen which you can use an old frame, you can use anything that obviously has space in the center is perfect, but the important thing is just to make sure that your sealing the edges so that the pulp doesn't bleed out from under it. Put your frame inside and you're going to place your fingers inside the frame and move the pulp around, allow the pulp to lay into the mesh screen, depending on the thickness of the paper that you want. You wanna lift up your screen and you'll see what it looks like and from there you can decide whether you wanna dunk it back in or move on to the next step. Now, I have this little tin here. You can use a cookie sheet. I have this little tool that I bought at the paint store for a dollar and I like to just drain the water a little bit by gently rolling over the pulp, and this is where you can actually add texture to it. In this form, it's almost like clay. Some of my pulp is lifting off the screen and what you can do is go back into you pulp mix and you can actually add to it or kind of work with your fingers and mold it back into the paper. It's very forgiving. Now, we're gonna put this absorbant towel over my little pulp mixture, then you're just gonna press it down into the frame, making sure that I'm very careful 'cause I don't wanna rip the pulp off of the screen yet, I just wanna kinda drain any excess water, and then gently peel back the cloth and if you get any little holes again, you can just fill it in with the pulp. Now, I'm going to take a piece of cloth and I'm gonna transfer it on to this cloth. What I'm doing is I'm taking the piece that I'm gonna dry on and I'm actually like making it adhere to this piece, so that when I turn it over, it'll be sticking more to this piece than it is to the screen, and then you flip over the screen and what I like to do is scratch the screen, so now you have your piece of paper. I love the way this looks. It'll take a little bit of time to dry so just set it down and after it's done drying, you will have your very own pretty paper, basically just cut down, do whatever you want with it, that's how you make paper.