Grow Your Own Paper
A wonderful handbook for beginners,Grow Your Own Paperoverflows with beautiful photos of papers speckled with flowers, leaves, and seeds. With a blender, a mold, and a few other basic materials, crafters can transform harvests from the garden (or the craft store) into lovely handmade papers. (Even a trip to the grocery store can yield papermaking supplies: apples, bananas, corncob silk, parsley, and tea leaves all make nice papers.) Maureen Richardson offers very general guidelines on growing and gathering the botanicals, as well as a rundown of basic papermaking techniques. Each of the 50 recipes refers directly to these basic methods, so they're essentially all variations on a few themes, yet they result in many different looks.--Amy Handy