Making paper from Jerusalem Artichoke

Hi, I am restarting this thread to focus on Jerusalem Artichoke fiber and paper making without hijacking the original one.

I took the traditional steps for paper making of retting and alkaline hydrolysis:

1. Separating lignocellulose by retting the stems in water for a week, rinse well
2. Boil in water to remove more impurities
3. Burn dry grass clippings to make a weak alkaline solution (can buy stronger chemical)
4. Boil JA lignocellulose in alkaline solution for 2 hours to partially remove lignin and hemicellulose (fibers turn from stiff to pliable)
5. Smashed to small pieces with a hammer and later chopped into smaller fragments with a blender (a high speed blender will work much better)
6. Boil chopped okra and use the sticky musilage as binding agent
7. Add small amount of coffee filter paper for strength
8. Mix and blend to make the paper pulp
9. Pour onto a layer of chiffon fabric for shaping
10. Press to remove water and air dry

Here is the samples of paper made from
1. Sunchoke fiber + okra
2. Sunchoke fiber + okra + silk fiber
3. Sunchoke fiber + okra + coffee filter

1 is easy to break when bent. Adding stronger filter greatly improve the flexibility. Since coffee filter is a lot cheaper and easy to made into pulp, my later experiment all included some anount of coffee filter paper in there.

Choices of natural formation aid

There are quite a few things that can be added to the pulp to disperse the fibers evenly. Okra, hibiscus root, kiwi root, malabar chestnut root, cactus, hydrolyzed peach gum etc. Sometimes people have their own secret recipes. I saw in some videos individual sheet of paper is sandwiched between two layers of felts to press. Interestingly, with the formation aid, multiple layers of wet paper off the screen can be stacked and pressed all at once without sticking togerther.