Turning worn-out cloth into paper....or at least trying to!

I'm a crazy woman and a crazy teacher. I keep thinking of giant projects for the history class I teach (like having each kid make their own miniture wattle and daub house, making milk paint, making ink from alder cones). And this week's project will be making paper the medieval way....with old cloth scraps!

Let me start off by saying, making paper from cloth is easier said than done. But, I've learned a lot...and I haven't even made a sheet of paper yet!

I started off by finding old bits of clothing that I wasn't going to use for rags and might make fun colored cloth. I then removed all the seams (since those usually have polyester thread) and started cutting some into strips.

Lot's of cloth scraps. Most of these I probably won't end up using. Let's focus on the pink blanket.

Pink swaddle blanket ripped into strips. I should have made the strips half that size

I chopped up the strips of pink cloth. I should have made the cuts 1/2 the size.

I lost my camera for a bit, but I boiled those pink pieces of fabric in washing soda (20% by weight, around about). Then I tried to beat them to a pulp. They were far more resistant to being beaten to a pulp than my nettle that I turned into paper.

This was frustrating. I smacked them for at least 5 minutes and didn't see much progress. Eventually, I decided, "Let's just throw these suckers in the blender and see what happens!" I know it's better to beat then to cut, but the beating wasn't unraveling the weave. So into the blender they went. They turned into a pulp! Well.... about half in each blender batch. The other half tangled around the blades in a big wad that made my blender so sad that it would overheat and turn off.

So, I'd take the tangled mat from around the blades and cut it into tinier pieces. Finally, I got the whole batch pulpified. You can see it in the below picture.

the pink pulp that worked....and the other pulps that didn't.

You can see a bunch of different wads of "pulp." Many did not work. The purple and far right white wads are paper and lint. Those worked. The middle white wad did NOT work. I was sure that would be the easiest to turn to a pulp, too!

That middle white wad was a bunch of pillbottle cotton that I'd saved for years. Here you can see it before I boiled it in washing soda.

Cotton floof from pill bottles. First I boiled it in washing soda.

It stayed stingy. I'd beat it. Still stringy. I'd blend it. Still stringy. Something about it makes it want to cling to itself and make string. I thought, "Maybe they added some chemical to it." So I boiled it in Sythrapol (used for stripping fabric for dying). It didn't do diddly, other than making the house stink. that is.

So, I thought, "Maybe that fibre is just too strong and fresh, and we need something that's worn down by years of wear and basically rhetted by use. I'll try this old blue shirt!" The blue was an old knit shirt that was falling apart so bad that it was generating holes everywhere. I thought that would mean it would fall apart quickly. So I ripped it into 1/2 inch strips and then cut those into squares. I boiled them in washing soda. And put batches in the blender...and nothing. They just wanted to stay knit, and wouldn't unravel!

I felt like giving up, so I tried making pulp with paper (printer paper falls apart pretty easily with washing soda and boiling water) and I added cotton dryer lint to it. That worked well...but it's not terribly historical!

(And now it's time to read my kids a bedtime story. Hopefully I'll have time to post more experiments after I get them to sleep.)

So far, things that had worked:

Loosely woven "gauze-like" fabric

Printer paper

Cotton dryer lint

Things that hadn't worked:

Knit cloth

The cotton stuff from pill bottles.

Then I thought, "What if I tried other woven cloth? Maybe that would work well?" So I ripped up some old thin cotton pants I had. I ripped them in 1/4 to 1/2 inch strips, and then cut them into squares. Like everything else, I boiled them in washing soda and then put them in the blender. The pink cloth had unraveled in the blender on "low." But, since the pants had a tighter weave, they required "high." But, they did turn into a pulp!

tiny pieces of pants

Tiny pieces in the blender

Tiny pieces blended to a pulp

While I was trying to find enough cloths so that each eventual piece of paper is sandwiched between cloth to dry them, I ran across these terrible Gerber flat diapers. They've been falling apart since I bought them 10 years ago. They shed lint like nobodies business, and rip way too easily. There were TERRIBLE diapers. BUT! They might be perfect for making pulp!

Ripping the strips of the terrible diapers

They're already falling apart. which is finally a good thing!

To rip the strips, I go along the shorter edge and slice in little increments. Then I go and rip those snips to make nice long strips. It works great. My arms are sore from ripping SO MUCH fabric today, but I'm glad I've finally found things that are easy to beat into a pulp!

The terrible diapers that always fell apart thankfully fell right apart! They were already trying to fall apart in the pot, and a quick trip through the blender made them turn right into pulp.

The easiest way to test to see if something is a pulp is to put it in water and see if it suspends nicely and evenly without tangling. I'll try to get a picture of that tomorrow. But another easy way to check it to try and pull a chunk apart. If it easily pulls apart without trying to be yarn or dreads, and pulls in a kind of fluffy way, it's a relatively decent pulp. I'm sure there's a lot better pulp out there than this, but I'm pretty sure this will do.

At the bottom is my most-recent batch of pulp. You can see how it kind of pulls apart in a feathery way.

Tomorrow, I'll try making paper with this. Here's hoping it works, because the class is going to be making paper on Monday!

This makes me wonder if you can run fabric through a cross-cut paper shredder as a pre-blender step.

Maybe the fluff from the pill bottles isn't cotton. It might be polyester, which might not work for paper.

Cheryl Gallagher wrote:Maybe the fluff from the pill bottles isn't cotton. It might be polyester, which might not work for paper.

I was wondering if the pill bottle fluff has longer fibres than regular machine spun fabric. Cotton comes in different varieties, and one wouldn't want a lot of short bits getting into the pills.

That said, a burn test would show a difference quickly if pill bottle fluff isn't cotton.

Christopher Weeks wrote:This makes me wonder if you can run fabric through a cross-cut paper shredder as a pre-blender step.

I'm guessing the shredder wouldn't like it. I would test carefully.

This whole thread does point out why paper was such a precious material before the Industrial Age. Paper seems more common earlier in Japan, where it was made out of three indigenous shrubs. Was "ease of turning it to pulp" a factor in this? Or, did they simply have techniques that allowed them to make paper out of less well pulped starting material? https://www.japanesepaperplace.com/papermaking-in-japan/

I do recall that paper-making processes were tightly kept secrets. Egyptian papyrus paper was prized and humans worked hard to reverse engineer it when the technique was lost, although this wiki link doesn't consider it "paper". This same article states that by the 13th Century, Spain was using water power in paper production. I'm guessing Nicole is figuring out why mechanization of some sort is of great value!

That gets me wondering how they managed the "chopping" part? Did they dry the material so that it shattered more easily into small lengths?

It also makes me wonder if it isn't time we went back to looking at various farming "waste" for paper production, rather than trees. I've read that flax seed producers need a use for the flax plants which apparently don't decompose easily, but are too branched to make quality linen out of. (Growing for seed vs growing for fibre uses the same plant, but differs in management, but R Ranson is the one to explain the subtleties of that.)

Jay Angler wrote:This same article states that by the 13th Century, Spain was using water power in paper production. I'm guessing Nicole is figuring out why mechanization of some sort is of great value!

That gets me wondering how they managed the "chopping" part? Did they dry the material so that it shattered more easily into small lengths?

Maybe before they were using watermills, they were just retting fibres and bashing them? I managed to make nettle paper with just retting it, boiling it in washing soda, rubbing it dry to make it shorter, and then beating it with a mallet and my rolling pin. Over-retted flax and nettle would probably be great for paper. I think some people also might have worn down the bast fibres with lye? A lot of people on reddit were saying they used lye for breaking down bast fibres and cloth.

You actually don't want to "chop" the fibers (sharp blenders are not a perfect tool for pulp production), but rather want to beat them so they fall apart and are fluffy. I think my blender is dull enough that it's doing that. I don't notice any of my fibers being cut...just unraveled, worn out and fluffy.

I'm thinking paper production probably wasn't that high in the 11th and 12th century in Europe. Maps are made on parchment, and I'm pretty sure most books are, too. Since books were still entirely hand-written until the invention of the printing press in 1440, books were still very expensive and slow to produce. Many were more like jewelry and art than just things to read. Why have a book made on flimsy paper, when you could have it on thick parchment? So there probably wasn't too much motivation at first to make lots of paper, especially if you're doing it hand. But, once water mills are put to use in making them, paper production becomes a lot easier!

Here's a video showing the medieval way of "beating to a pulp"

It also makes me wonder if it isn't time we went back to looking at various farming "waste" for paper production, rather than trees. I've read that flax seed producers need a use for the flax plants which apparently don't decompose easily, but are too branched to make quality linen out of. (Growing for seed vs growing for fibre uses the same plant, but differs in management, but R Ranson is the one to explain the subtleties of that.)

One of the difficulties in turning cloth into paper is the fact that a large percentage of it is made from synthetic materials. Polyester, rayon, spandex and other stretchy-non-fibrous materials don't make good paper. Wool also doesn't make good paper, but thee isn't nearly as much of that mixed into our cloth. But, now polyester and other synthetic materials make up almost 70% of new clothing. And, I've noticed that most "cotton" shirts and clothing are usually at least 20% polyester. I think this also becomes an issue when it comes to other sorts of recycling of old cloth. A shirt that's 100% cotton is easier to turn back into material to use again, but polyester behaves differently. And it's hard to separate out the polyester. This article by Wired goes into that:

Wired Article wrote:While water bottles can be recycled back into bottles several more times, once PET is made into polyester, that’s the last time it can be recycled.

Apparently, one company has managed to turn 100% polyester into 100% polyester clothing, but that's rare. And it requires polyester that's free of contaminates:

Wired wrote: Used textiles, on the other hand, have all sorts of contaminants and come in vastly varying quality and colors. In Europe, used polycotton and other textile blends are collected at three times the rate of 100-percent polyester, and that doesn’t even account for the dyes and finishes present in pretty much everything.

...

Unifi has solved this contamination problem by only accepting pre-consumer, 100-percent-polyester waste straight from factories and mixing carbon black into the polyester while it’s gooey. The result is a pure black recycled polyester. Unlike polyester made from bottles, you could call it “circular” with a straight face.

Eddie Ingle, Unifi’s CEO, is tentatively interested in sourcing post-consumer polyester waste but admits, “You run the risk of getting people just dumping stuff on you.” He tells the story of receiving a pallet of bags the company was told were 100-percent polyester. His employees had to hand-cut out the non-polyester plastic bottom

They manage to recycle polyester...but it's just scraps straight from the manufacture, not post-consumer polyester.

To get back to the time of turning rags into paper, we need to stop contaminating plant fibres with synthetic fibres. There's an ancient text that says, "You shall not wear cloth combining wool and linen" (Deuteronomy 22:11). People like to complain about that and how "silly" it is. But the more I learn about fibre, the more I think they were onto something by not mixing together fibres that operate very differently. It makes it hard to care for and hard to repurpose.

I finally got a big enough tub to try the pulp out in. I used just the pulp from the gauzy-diaper fabric. It made paper!

(I should have gotten more pictures of the process, but I'm just glad this worked!)

It took a lot of pulp. I'll definitely need the kids to be pulping paper to add to the cloth-pulp, just so there's enough for all 30 students.

I realized after making that test sheet of paper, that I'm going to need a lot more pulp for 30 kids. They'll be ripping and mashing paper to add to the amount of pulp, but I figured I should make a bunch more of the cloth pulp, too. I'd already trimmed all the seams off a pair of jeans, so I turned that into strips and snipped those strips, then boiled them in washing soda. Then, one handful per blender load, I blended them up. I discovered that jeans are a LOT more dense than the gauzy woven fabric. This shouldn't have surprised me, but I was still amazed at how much pulp came from a little handful of jean pieces.

ripping jeans and snipping them into pieces

one pair of jeans makes a lot of pulp!

A lot of this pulp could have been beaten even more. But, my blender really wants to overheat, and I had a lot to process! Hopefully this pulp works well enough, because tomorrow is the class!

I wonder how effectively one could convert fabric scraps to pulp with a ball mill. One could test the idea with a rock tumbler or cement mixer.

All the prepping and all the work paid off--the day went perfectly! I set up four stations:

Ripping waste paper (after the paper was ripped into little pieces, I put it in my Instant Pot to boil)

Beating/mashing paper scraps (3 people/time)

Making/"pulling" a piece of paper (1 person/time)

Stamping with stamps. I taught the kids a bit about the printing press and its effect on the production of paper. Only the youngest group (5-7 year olds) ended up using the stamps, but I'm glad I had them!

I didn't get many pictures--I was way too busy making paper and helping the kids move from station to station. But, here you can see the three stations in process.

Front is mashing to a pulp, back right is the vat for making paper, and back left is ripping paper station

There were a lot of paper and pulp scraps around the room to vacuum up, but I managed to not make a soggy mess when pulling the paper. I'm glad I brought two big tubs. The one on the far right has the mixture of cloth and paper pulp. The empty tub served as a nice place to put the deckle and "sponge" off some of the water. I just used an old diaper cloth to lay on top of the paper to press down lightly to soak up the water. I'd wring it out, and then soak up more water from the fresh paper, before putting the paper on a dry cloth.

From left-to-right: stack of new paper, sandwiched between old (clean) diaper cloth; empty tub for draining water off of the paper while still on the deckle; vat of pulpy water.

To make sure we could tell which paper was who's, I had them each write their name (in graphite pencil) on a piece of paper towel. This was laid on top of their page before I covered it in a dry cloth.

Student holding a paper towel to ID their piece of paper, next to a stack of newly-made paper.

Before laying the paper out to dry, I placed the whole stack on a new dry towel and put another dry towel on top. I then put my heavy cutting board ontop and PUSHED down as hard as I could. It's not as good as a paper press, but it's something. Hopefully. I'll be able to press the sheets more on another day, but this was all I could think of doing before needing to clean up everything. Thankfully, the school has drying racks, so I broke the stack of papers into smaller stacks and laid them out to dry.

So many hand-made papers. lying out to dry!

The kids had a lot of fun! Some groups of kids really liked the mashing and really got into beating the paper to a pulp. Other's really enjoyed just ripping. Some loved stirring the vat of pulp. The youngest kids LOVED stamping. I had some kids come in during lunch, just to rip or beat more paper, or stir the vat. It was a lot of fun, and I think we all learned a lot!