Seika classes EXTRA: Paper making saturdays

 A month or 2 ago I learned about the amazing opportunity to follow extra, specialized classes on the Saturdays and as Seika student you payed way less than outsiders, who can also follow these classes making them a pleasant mix of old and young, student and non-student.
I really wanted to take some extra class to learn a new technique, so I picked up the "Assembly hour & garden" brochure. I have no clue why it has such a strange name, we are not in a garden and the classes take about 4 hours for 5 Saturdays.
Anyway, going through their brochure there were options such a making your own bento box out of glass, Japanese scroll making, rap music class, machine sewing and, my personal pick, paper making!
I have always wanted to know how to make my own paper as my main way of making work is print making and sometimes finding the right paper for pressing my prints on and for what you envision is horrible, especially in NL (Japan is paper heaven!)

My incredibly sweet boyfriend gave me the, even though discounted for students, quite expensive course for my birthday.
And yesterday was finally the first day of the Saturday paper making class, only 4 more classes after this one unfortunately.
Our sensei is very nice and explains everything clearly. I was a bit afraid I wouldn't be able to get the technical terms. My understanding of the Japanese language became very good at this point but technical words I still have to look up.
And as paper making is a 'hands-on' class she shows everything first, making it even easier to follow.
Each week we will be making paper in a different way, for example next week we will work layering colored pulp. Eventually we will be making paper with self chosen material which can be really anything that can be made into a pulp or that can be weaved into the paper layers.

This week we started by making "plain" white and off-white paper. It was amazing to do and so much can be done with it!

the studio

Explaination about the different kinds of bark that paper is made from.
We today we worked with the light bark called Kozo. Very strong bark and even when making thin paper out of it it stays strong. 

Different samples of papers we will be trying our hand at the coming weeks.

Time to get cracking, fishermen's style!

too tall for the picture....

Plucking apart the wet Kozo with our hands before letting the machine pulverize it further.

The machine doing it's work

Draining the water

Leaving only pulp

Preparing one of the big pulp baths

 The sieving of the soft, floating pieces of kozo pulp in the water mixed with a binding material.
This was actually quite hard to do the very first time, I screwed up my first few sieves up but it's very easy to get back on track.

Drying the paper on a hot plate

Samples of my paper.
I experimented making craters in my paper. One of the papers is completely covered in craters like a moon.

Here are a few videos of the paper making class and different parts of making it. I didn't take any video's of the actual sieving of the paper stupidly enough. Maybe next time! Clicking on a link below will take you to one of my video's on YouTube.

Pulp machine

Draining the water

Raking the pulp in the bath

Mixing it all together

Drying the paper