Decorative Sunday
This week we present four paper samples from Cave Paper, a distinctive American handmade production paper company. Cave Paper was founded in Minneapolis in 1994 by Amanda Degener and Bridget O'Malley. In 2020, Cave Paper was passed on to Zoë Goehring who moved the studio to Tuscon. The samples shown here are:
Galaxy: a rich black dusted with mica flakes. The black is an optical black made from dense layering of indigo and walnut dyes. The dyed paper is then coated with hot melted gelatin and sprinkled with mica, a technique introduced to them by papermaker Richard Flavin (1943-2020).
Green Crackle: a natural flax sheet is size and dried and then crumpled and dunked into pigmented water. The paper is then quickly opened, laid flat, and rinsed.
Cloudy Sky: a cotton rag paper with a cloudy pulp couched onto a blue base sheet.
Alphabet: made from recycled sheets with letterpress printing. The Hollander beater breaks down the paper while leaving the letters intact in the slurry. When forming the paper, the letters float to the surface and are caught as the paper mould is lifted full of pulp.
These samples were inserted in the article "Cave Paper [continued]" by Amanda Degener and Bridget O'Malley in Matrix 27, Winter 2007, pp. 13-17, printed at John and Rosalind Randle’s Whittington Press in Risbury, Herefordshire, England in an edition of 750 copies, another donation from our late friend Jerry Buff (1931-2025).
View more Decorative Sunday posts.
