Saturday 11am

This is what my kitchen is going to look like for a while--hehe! You already saw the other side. Thank heaven for microwaves and cold tuna salad--ha!

I stacked the papers, sandwiched between pieces of couch paper, under my heavy dictionary. I put a plastic placemat under the book to keep it from getting damp.

Here's the damp paper.

Below is what the couch papers look like. They do absorb color and you have to watch to use the same couch papers that are colored with paper where it won't matter or they can stain the paper. We do have some fresh new ones when we need them. They tear easily when they are wet. They are fat and cottony--wick the water off the paper.

I laid the papers out near the window and the breeze.

They buckle a lot when they dry. If you wanted to really take your time and leave them under a book for a long, long time they would dry flat, I suppose. I lose patience. I managed to wait three days once and they were still damp in the center and still buckled--only in weirder shapes because the edges were dry--hehe! We have just been ironing them.

The experiment didn't go well. The large leaves have a surface that the pulp just doesn't want to stick to. Even after they dried--there were bubbles or pockets next to the leaf surfaces. We'll have to try to think of some other way to apply cottonwood leaves. Well, that is why Leah needed to try it out to see what would happen--and trying to embed them into the pulp didn't work. Just might not be something that can be done well at all--at least not by us--hehe! Decoupage would be so heavy and stiff...oh well...we'll see what we can come up with. I even thought of making a stamp instead of attaching a real leaf? Or using a real leaf for an imprint (we've done that before)...hummm?? Who knows?

Well, I did not sleep well last night at all until dawn. My left hip was really hurting for some reason (arthritis). Woke up at 8:30am--so I am pretty exhausted and might have to lay back down. Was trying to read SK--yawning and couldn't keep my eyes open so I came over here to blog--hehe! (I still have 200 pages left to go.) It is a dark, overcast morning--at least an easier day to nap if I can manage it--that's a blessing. (Never was a napper till I got fibro and still have a hard time napping.) A real noodle day--feel too muscle weak to start making paper yet. Maybe I'll start a movie.... :)