When I opened my home based paper making business in 2013, I aspired to make paper made primarily from local materials that will resonate with a sense of place. I wanted the paper to visually recall the deserts' wind, wandering sands and sublime serenity.
Initially, I intended to use flax, as it was a plant historically a native to the Levant region. However, I discovered that around a thousand years ago the Muslim empire replaced flax with cotton as they found cotton to be economically viable for their paper making industry. In fact, cotton so thoroughly replaced flax that it can no longer be found growing wild in the Levant! Recently, I read that archeobotanists who found ancient flax seeds at an archeological site are growing it as part of a model for restoration ecology at the Biblical Restoration Reserve at Neot Kedumim. Perhaps in the near future I may be granted my wish to make paper from locally grown flax.
Today, although cotton grown in Israel is of high quality, the whole textile industry - from the final cleaning of the raw cotton to the manufacturing of fabrics and clothing - moved to China and Jordon. Still, the annual preliminary checking of the quality of the cotton is performed locally, and cotton samples are sold cheaply by the kilogram.
After purchasing the cotton, I started looking for ways to obtain local earth pigments and found a company an hour's drive south from my home, that manufactures earth pigments from Israel’s deserts for the building industries. The company offered me several kilograms of each pigment as samples; dark brown pigments from the mountains of Eilat, greenish pigments from the Ramon Crater (residues of an ancient copper mine) , ochre reds from the Mamshit Valley (known as one of the trading routes of the Nabataeans), golden yellows from the Judean mountains in the south-east of Jerusalem, and creamy whites from the Dead Sea area. Later, I was able to obtain basalt powder from Ramat Hagolan. The earth pigments in themselves are reservoirs of memory imbued with a sense of place.
Raw cotton contains excellent long cellulose fiber for paper making, but it also carries small plant parts and field trash that needs to be cleaned. I begin making my cotton papers by cleaning the raw cotton by hand, then pass the cotton through a mini electric gin. When the cotton is clean, it is cut with a rotary cutter, and immersed overnight in water. It is then placed in a cake-like formation inside a large aluminum pot and cooked for several hours with lime (technically known as calcium hydroxide). The cooked cotton is subsequently rinsed and carefully placed in the Hollander beater where it is pulped for two to three hours. After the initial beating process, two-three tablespoons of retention aid is prepared in a blender with water and added to the beater for ten minutes. This liquid enables the pigments to adhere to the pulp. Two-three tablespoons of the desired pigment is mixed in the blender with water and added to the beater for another ten minutes. Finally, two-three tablespoons of internal sizing blended with water is added to the cotton pulp to make the finished paper less absorbent. The pulp is poured into a large container and water is added until the mixture is the right consistency.
Now the pulp is ready to be made into paper. I make the paper with a fine mold and deckle, couching the newly made sheets on a platform covered with thick flannel fabric. Each sheet of newly made paper is covered in fabric and piled one on top of the other. The stack is covered with a board and put into a paper press, where the papers are pressed, and all excess water is removed. The stack is taken out of the press and each sheet of paper is peeled from the fabric and put to dry in my homemade paper dryer.
These papers are a pleasure to behold and exude a beautiful physicality. Their texture is sandy, yet smooth to the touch and excellent for printing, drawing, and origami among other possibilities. They literally embody the sense of place I wished to achieve. They are like artifacts of the desert, a mirage of bygone wandering visions that set the stage for contemplation like the desert itself.
Desert paper with gold rubbings and an assortment of different shades of desert paper
Another type of desert paper I make is paper made from the mitnan plant, Thymelaea Hirsute, an indigenous Mediterranean coastal plain shrub. Mitnan was used by the Bedouins for rope making, basketry and as a medicinal herb, traditions that have mostly been forgotten.
As a source for paper making, it was first used by the handmade paper artist Joyce Schmidt, who established the first paper mill in Beer Sheba Israel in the late 1970’s after studying the art of paper making at the studio of Douglas Morse Howell. Joyce, together with the botanist Nelli Stavisky from the Ben-Gurion University, published an essay in 1983, entitled “Uses of Thymelaea hirsute (Mitnan) with emphasis on hand paper making”.
Preparing the mitnan fiber begins by going out to the field to trim the lower branches from a Mitnan plant so as not to damage its growth and vitality. Then I trim off its leaves and flowers to rid the branches of their toxic elements.
The branches are soaked overnight in a large container filled with fresh water. The branches are peeled to extract the soft fiber of the inner bark, then cooked and beaten into a pulp in the beater. Only sizing is added to the mitnan pulp.
I make mitnan papers in the Western method of papermaking as described in the cotton paper making process. The sheets of mitnan paper come out durable yet soft to the touch with a cloudy transparency and a slight sheen to them.
Branches and peeled strips of the mitnan plant , an assortment of mitnan papers and mitnan pulp
