If you are in the market for a good dry heave, let me point you in the right direction. We are studying China this week and the project we decided to undertake was homemade paper making. It started out so well intentioned and quickly plummeted to gross (much to the delight of my boys).
We didn't have all the supplies needed, but that didn't dampen our spirit of adventure. We definitely know how to make do with what we have. We foraged around for scrap paper careful to avoid newspaper or magazines that would compromise the quality of our fine paper. We added a scrap of orange construction paper to give our paper a flecked artsy look. A YouTube video also suggested using lint from the dryer. What a cool use for something we usually throw away. We blended the paper and lint with several cups of water in my blender. Then we added it to our sink with more water. That's when this project took a horrible left turn. The boys added some grapefruit scented spray to give our paper a designer smell. Then no one wanted to put their hand in the warm water in the sink. It looked, felt and smelled exactly like vomit. We put the pulp on a screen to form the paper and patted it with a sponge laughing, gagging and coughing the whole time. We flipped it over onto a clean sheet to dry and that's when we saw it... Tons of dog hair from the dryer lint was now embedded in our school project. We now have hairy, vomit paper. I think I may have found a use for it. Anyone need to write a note to a political figure? There you go... we have neatly tied in art, science, history and politics in one easy lesson. Your welcome.
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| My youngest won't touch the stuff |
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| Disgustingly awesome |
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| sponging the "vomit" paper (note the look of delight) |
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| This is horrible |
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| A closeup of our hairy paper (hungry?) |
