What fun I have been having!
Two summers ago, at a blissful two-week stint at Haystack in Maine, I got to use some of the seaweed paper that the paper class was playing with. Last summer I saved some seaweed from the Maine coast (another blissful two-week stint, this time vacation with my family). I dried out the seaweed and left it in a container in the basement, thinking I’d get around to working with it eventually. In February, I finally boiled up the seaweed and put it in the blender, then added some of my new flax pulp.
While I was boiling things up, I also cooked some daylily leaves that I have been squirreling away for the past three years. It didn’t grind up quite as finely as the seaweed, but it is still a wonderful texture – a bit like particle board, but softer.
So, for the past week or so, I have been making seaweed and daylily paper and I am very happy with the result.
Here is an image of two vessels I made. The one on the left is made with seaweed in flax pulp, the one on the right has daylily leaves in flax pulp. I made these vessels for 100 Tea Bowls, part of the Art League/Torpedo Factory Ikebana show in early March. I was glad for the opportunity to be a part of this show, even though my work is neither ceramic nor functional.
The tea bowl form is new for me, and I learned some important lessons about even shrinkage and how to make a vessel sit sturdily. As a result, I am naming this new series Cup Half Full/Cup Half Empty. The empty ones are the “seconds” which still look quite good, but (and?) wobble and tilt (my cup runneth over). In the image above, Cup Half Full is the daylily bowl (right) and Cup Half Empty is the seaweed bowl (left).