We’ve lived on the Kitsap Peninsula for 45 years now. When we moved here from Seattle, this land on traditional Suquamish territory was zoned rural, and the timber company Pope, owned vast swathes of land where it clear-cut the timber, and replanted mostly mono-cultures of Douglas Fir. Over the years, Pope morphed into Olympic Resources, converting most of their timberland into housing developments to capitalizing on the need for more housing for families like mine. But one of the casualties of unbridled development have been the health of the lowland forests.
Ivy is a vine once adored as a landscaping plant, sold at nurseries, planted by landscapers, and promoted as a great evergreen ground cover. Over the years the tenacious, aggressive qualities of this vine, its ability to reproduce, its tolerance of all types of weather and soil conditions, has made this plant a destroyer of Native habitat. If you see ivy going up a tree, that is a death sentence for that tree. I do think about how the quality of my life would be greatly reduced if trees could not survive here. Where would my favorite songs birds go to nest? Where would I find wild herbs and Nettles for dinner? Where would the huckleberries and Salal find their canopy of shade trees so they can nourish the birds and us?
Since humans introduced this plant into the Pacific Northwest landscape, only humans can try to control it. We’ve been pulling the vines for 45 years now, and there are still lots available. For over forty years I’ve been using the vines for making hoops, wreaths, and for weavers in many types of baskets. But it’s time to find out if the leaves will be useful for making paper?
The ivy vines that run parallel to the ground are the vines I use for weaving baskets. Once ivy heads up into a tree its qualities change and it is no longer useful for weaving. Ivy is now using the tree as its armature to grow vertical and to reproduce. To harvest ivy I usually reach into a patch along the ground and pull on one piece, that piece will loosen up many other pieces and I’ll end up with a tub-full of various lengths and widths. The thicker pieces can be split in half if needed, or they can be used whole for the wreaths and hoops. The thinner pieces are used for the weaving. I usually dry the materials first to shrink them and then soak them til flexible when ready to use. If I want to peal the skin off easily, I wind all the vines into wreaths that fit into my cooking pot. I cook them for 15-30 minutes. After cooling it’s easy to scrape off the peal to get a light colored material that can also take on a dye color.
Any material cooked for paper is best to cook outside in case there are irritating fumes. I used just the leaves and short stems that attached the leaves to the vine and cooked them for 3 hours. I let them sit and cool in the water overnight and drained them through a paint strainer the next day and rinsed them. I did not use any chemicals in the cooking process so all the drained liquid is fine for watering the garden.
The weather got stormy, so I moved my messy operation from the porch into my studio. There are additives I can blend into the pulp if there doesn’t seem to be enough cellulose fiber in the plant to hold together when I pull a sheet of paper from the vat of slurry onto a screen mold. The ivy on its own was too weak and fell apart, so I added a postage-stamp size piece of soak abaca fiber with each blender full of pulp mix.
On the right in the above picture are postage-stamp size pieces of abaca fiber. On the left are pieces of cotton linter. If a plant paper needs just a bit more fiber to work well, just a little bit of these fibers are useful. Both of these fibers are available from papermaking suppliers. I purchased mine from Carriage House Papers in NY.
I also added formation aid, like I did with the Sword Fern paper, made out of Okra that is soaked overnight in a jar of water. I squeeze the slimey goo from the Okra into the vat of pulp and water and mix it around. The formation aid slows down the draining of the water from the screened pulp. This allows for better paper formation and a thinner paper.
Luckily for me our son, Spence, made this cool stairway to the storage loft upstairs. It makes a perfect spot for me to lay out the papers to dry after they’ve been pressed overnight.
As the paper dried the qualities are observable. A cockling effect takes place in this paper since I don’t have it weighted down as it dries. I might want that quality and leave it just so. Or I may rewet the paper and keep it under weight as it dries if I really want the paper flat. I usually use my paper in other artwork, so the flatness isn’t an issue. But lately I’m dabbling in making books, so I also want some flat papers to work with.
It is fun to see how thin I can get the papers for the quality of translucency. These ivy leaves are laminated between two ultra-thin layers of paper. As the papers dry, their qualities keep changing. It is part of the process I enjoy…watching the changes.
So what have I learned from the Ivy Leaves? In spring, there is fiber, but not enough on its own to make paper. But what if I harvest it in summer? Will the plant have more fiber available then? Also, I cooked the Ivy leaves for 3 hours. Was that longer than I needed to cook it. Did the heat break down the fibers too much? Hummm. I can see that I should try this again during another season, just like I’ll try with the Sword Fern.
I hope you will consider experimenting with something that interests you.
Thank you for listening.
