Grow Your Own Paper: Recipes for Creating Unique Handmade Papers

A range of beautiful handmade papers awaits you--just open the door to your backyard! Draw on nature's plentiful (and inexpensive) sources to create beautifully embellished handmade papers, using this practical and inspirational book as your guide. Learn how easy it is to cultivate, harvest, and prepare all-natural materials to make striking papers for use in a range of projects, from collages and greeting cards to subtly textured writing paper. Discover:

* More than 100 recipes for creating a multitude of exquisite papers, using fresh and pressed flowers, petals, seeds, leaves, ferns, grasses, and herbs

* Directions for customizing papers with watermarks and embossing, plus tips on making more complex papers with cooked fibers

* Special instructions for creating wonderfully scented potpourri papers

* Basic papermaking techniques, explained in easy to follow step-by-step directions

A wonderful handbook for beginners, Grow Your Own Paper overflows with beautiful photos of papers speckled with flowers, leaves, and seeds. With a blender, a mold, and a few other basic materials, crafters can transform harvests from the garden (or the craft store) into lovely handmade papers. (Even a trip to the grocery store can yield papermaking supplies: apples, bananas, corncob silk, parsley, and tea leaves all make nice papers.) Maureen Richardson offers very general guidelines on growing and gathering the botanicals, as well as a rundown of basic papermaking techniques. Each of the 50 recipes refers directly to these basic methods, so they're essentially all variations on a few themes, yet they result in many different looks. --Amy Handy