Making Your Own Rice Paper

By following instructions below you can make an attractive rice paper, fine or textured, from rice straw, bamboo, or mulberry. Homemade paper is not the fine paper from China, but has a personal character of its own. There are two major stages in making a sheet of paper from raw fiber - pulping and sheet forming.

Pulping   Rice Straw   Bamboo   Mulberry

Equipment

• A rust-proof pail.
• A stainless steel pot.
• A mortar and pestle or bat and board.
• A large boiling pot.
• A sharp knife.
• Wood ash, which may from your fireplace.
• Rubber gloves.
• Sieves.

1. Preparing rice straw - Strip off the grass leaves. The nodes in stem aren't great for papermaking. Chop them off and use only the straight stiff segments of stems between nodes. Cut the rice straw about 1 inch long.
   
   
2. Soaking - Soak the straw in a pail of cold water at least overnight. Chinese papermakers used soak them for a week. When the water turns yellowish brown with pigment leaching out of the stems, change the water a few times during the soaking. Then rinse the soaked straw thoroughly.
   
   
3. Making a caustic solution - Wood ash is time consuming, but may yield better paper due to gentle cooking action and tendency to rinse out easily. The measurement of wood ash solution is 26 oz of wood ash and 15 quarts of water for one LB. of dry fiber. To make wood ash as solution, boil ash in water for half an hour and let it settle overnight. Next day, sieve the mixture into a stainless steel pot. If some ash managed to get through the sieve, line the sieve with a sheet of paper towel and filter the solution again. The solution is highly caustic - time for rubber gloves.
   
   
   
   
4. Cooking - Cook the soaked straw in a large boiling pot filled with the caustic solution. It would take at least three hours to break up the fibers. The rice straw is ready when it crumbles when pinched. Try not to overcook the fiber - if it tears apart too easily, your paper will be weak. Rinse the cooked straw in cool water after cooking.
   
   
   
   
5. Beating - The initial beating loosens the fiber strands and spreads them out. Pound the fiber with a bat. Use some force, but allow the weight of the bat to do most of the work. When the fiber has spread out, fold the fiber on themselves and start again. Beat for at least 15 minutes, until the fibers crushed into pulp.
   
   

1. Collecting bamboo - You can use bamboo leaves and branches, or bamboo culms for your paper. If you want very fine rice paper, use culms. Shred the plant material as finely as possible. A food processor may be helpful.
   
   
2. Cooking - Put 1 kg of shredded bamboo in a boiling pot, and fill it with the caustic solution as discussed above in rice straw pulping. Cook the bamboo about five hours. With rubber gloves on, test the bamboo fiber by feeling it. It is ready when it feels slippery.
   
   
3. Washing - With rubber gloves on, sieve the cooked bamboo through a fine screen (a nylon stocking may be used). Wrap the fiber and wash it in clean fresh water, squeezing the bulge in the wrapping under the running water until it is clean.
   
   
4. Beating - Remove the fiber from the wrapping and beat it until it is pulpy. If you don't have a mortar and pestle, a kitchen blender works.

1. Harvesting - Harvest mulberry branches that about 1 inch in diameter and about 8 feet in length.
   
   
2. Steaming - Cut the branches into even length that fit into a big pot. Place a vegetable steamer in the bottom of the pot and fill with about 2 inches of water. Put branches in the pot vertically and cover tightly with a lid. Steam the branches for at least 30 minutes, until the bark shrinks back and is easy to peel away from the woody core.
   
   
   
   
3. Striping - As soon as you can handle the bark, begin to strip the inner bark from the branches while it is still warm. Make a vertical slit at the bottom of the mulberry branch to get the entire inner and outer bark in your hand. Scrape outer bark off the inner bark. Scraping off the outer bark ensures that your rice paper will turn out pure and white.
   
   
4. Washing - Wash the stripped inner bark from mulberry branch and pick out any remaining specks of outer bark.
   
   
5. Cooking - Fill a cooking pot with wood ash solution as we discussed in rice straw pulping prior to boiling. Add the damp mulberry fiber and cook for 4 hours, stirring the mulberry fiber occasionally, until it pulls apart easily. Let it cool down. Rinse the fiber twice by dunking it into a bucket of clean water.
   
   
6. Beating - Squeeze out the excess water from the mulberry fiber. Hand beat with a bat or mallet for 10 minutes. If you feel the fiber is dry, add some water.
   

• Deckle and mould.
• Vat.
• A rust-proof pail.
• Felts.
• Pressing board.
• Rolling pin.

1. Vatting - Fill your vat halfway with water. The vat should at least seven inches deep and two inches larger than your deckle and mould. Add fiber pulp to the vat and give your pulp a good stir. While the pulp still moving, dip your mould-and-deckle, front edge first, into the pulp. Lift it out of the vat and give it a little shake. This will let fibers woven together to a stronger paper.
   
   
   
   
2. Draining - Drain the water for about five minutes. Take off the deckle. Do this carefully. If water dropped onto newly formed sheet by accident, take your mould back to the vat.
   
   
3. Couching - Smoothly but not too slowly roll the mould, paper side down, onto a wet felt, or a blotting paper, with a stack of newspaper underneath. This will drive away the air between the paper and felt. Gently remove the mould.
   
   Repeat the process until you have as many sheets as you want, each with its felt between the sheets.
   
   
   
   
4. Pressing - Put another piece of wet felt or blotting paper over the newly-made papers, and press out the water with a rolling pin. Peel off the top sheet wet felt very carefully. Let it dry.