On Making Toilet Paper and Other Creative Projects

The crisis of 2020 that our world is in has stimulated a toilet paper shortage for many people.  I am not one of them but I do have a son with a wife and three daughter’s who were ecstatic over the stack of toilet paper and paper towels my sister Kari had brought me.  In our Zoom meeting they asked to see the house and that pile of paper was the most exclaimed over thing they saw.

When I knocked a stack of egg cartons off of the fridge, I remembered that I had posted that I knew how to make my own paper so I wasn’t worried about the toilet paper shortage.  While in the Zoom meeting my son Kelly asked if I had made that toilet paper yet.  I realized that it is truly possible that people out there might really need a recipe for making toilet paper so I have begun the project. 

I have made homemade paper twice so I understand the basics.  Of course, you have to have some old paper around to start with and for our tushes the only thing I can find that could be soft enough and still be flushable is a pile of egg cartons.  I have roughly torn up eight, eighteen-pack cartons into a plastic tub.  Today is the 3^rd day of them soaking in water in the summer kitchen.  I’ve stirred the soup mess with a garden drill bit for planting bulbs with my cordless Makita drill.  Yesterday I noticed that the carton bits are beginning to break down more thoroughly.  They have soaked enough if I was just going to make homemade crafting paper but they need to be smoother than split pea soup for toilet paper.   Today I will mix the mess again with the bulb planting drill bit and if I deem it to be soupy and soft enough, I will go at it with my stick blender.  Don’t worry about having too much water in your mix.  The excess water will press out when you screen the paper. 

When I have the paper completed, I will post the process and my pictures on Facebook but I’m giving you my “for real” projected activity in this article.   There are probably going to be a couple of things that will pop up as I do the project as usual, but the next step for me is to make a split pea soup consistency of mushy paper pulp.  Once I have it really smooth and soupy, I will add more water to thin it to a runny gruel consistency.   I will remove a window screen or two or more from my house windows, wash the dust out of them and lay them over a plastic covered work table outside where it is not raining.  Then I will scoop soupy paper pulp all over one screen in whatever shape I feel compelled to do at the time.  I will take a piece of wax paper and press the pulp into the screen until it is very thin.  It’s possible that I might use a rolling pin or maybe a flat plastic cutting board to press the paper down until it is very thin on the screen.  Once I am satisfied with the thinness of my creation, I will lay a 2^nd window screen over it and holding them together will flip the mass over and leave the two screens together.  I will gently scrape protruding paper pulp off of the screen which will now be on top.  This part is so the paper will remove easily from the screen when it is dry.   I will leave the 2 screens on the table until the mass is dry enough to move without crumbling, at which time I will bring them in the house and find a place for them to complete drying.  I will be able to remove one of the screens at that time.  I will collect all soupy pulp from the work area and put it back in the bowl and repeat the process on the next screen.  When it comes time to remove the dry toilet paper from the screen, I will consider whether I will pull it off in a solid sheet and then cut it, mark it with a pizza cutter, or simply risk cutting my screen with a knife.  I don’t know yet. 

A variation I am considering attempting is to create a light and airy paper by creating a ferment before I spread the paper pulp on the screen.  If I do this, I’ll probably have to make room in the kitchen for a screen because the temperature will have to remain warm enough for rising.  This is when I will learn if my yeast was too powerful or if I added too much sugar to feed the yeast.  I’m not looking to make tall toilet paper.

Once my paper is dry, I will cut it into squares or rectangles (never circles because it wastes valuable edges) and stack it neatly on the counter in the bathroom or mail it to Kelly.

There are many variations to try when making paper but I would never suggest using plant material in this process because the plant particles will dry far too crispy to be comfortable to use.  We no longer dye toilet paper because it is hard on septic systems.  But for the ladies and gentlemen who really want their toilet paper to be white you can add bleach to the pulp, but be sure to wear gloves while working with bleach.  If the sun is out and it is pretty hot outside you can lay your screens out on tables to bleach naturally.  This is really a personal preference and I will pass on it because I have a lot of other experiments to and prototypes to think up.

As an abundantly creative person I have a plethora of ideas which I have to direct toward outcomes I really want to see fulfilled in my life.  Toilet paper is not on the top of my list but I will continue the process because I can see that the people who really need the paper haven’t freed their creative process enough to attempt anything other than playing with the paper they currently have.

Another project is my raspberry bed which I posted on Facebook a couple of weeks ago.  I wanted to use rebar to pound into the ground to hold my boards in place but most of my rebar is too long and I really get tired of cutting it with a hack saw and the grinder seems to have a thingy on it that makes a half inch groove while stinking and burning me with sparks.  The Sawz-All is missing something.  It has more blades I can try but some kind of a guard is missing and until I understand it, I will cut hazelnut stakes and make the ends pointy and pound them in the ground.  By the time they have decomposed I will probably have bought the length of rebar that suits me.  I cut short 1-by scraps, drilled holes, and used recycled electric fence wire to strap them on to metal fence posts for my raspberry supports.  It will work for now and I think it is cute.  One of my favorite people said it looks “magical”.

As my sister Kari helps to tidy my property, she is finding bits of broken shovels, rakes and other debris.  Some of it is making it to the trash but I see a face in the gas stove top mom gave me and a way to make a face on a broken shovel.  The most important thing that is happening to me lately is that I am able to see that I can put that stuff in the same place where I can find it when the creative urge takes me, instead of leaving it in the yard or the bushes.  Kari has not located the final Easter egg that I couldn’t find but unless it was eaten by an animal, I have confidence in her being the one to locate it!

My goats are a joy and a royal pain in the ass.  I want them to eat the excess vegetation but they want to run around and eat the blossoms and the bark off of my young fruit trees and blueberries.  I can’t have that.  My portable attempts at pens have failed.  Tying them out means I have to get them to a post with them dragging me across the yard.  Yes, they are dwarves as I have posted on Facebook, but a dwarf is not a pigmy.  I have wasted a lot of time creating enclosures they escape from but yesterday I began another effort to enlarge their personal area with 8’ foot pig panels.  So far it is working.  I looked and they are still in it this morning. They need to come out of the pen daily for hygienic reasons but if I can enlarge their “bedroom” then I can use the larger stock panels to create a pen that I could drag with the tractor.  The ideal solution would be to have all of my gardens inside of fenced areas and let the goats manage the lawn.   The older I get the more I get tired of putting in and pulling out fence posts, but I can see that as more fencing and fence posts come my way, I am getting better and better at choosing the best permanent locations for them and I am getting a lot better at erecting them in ways that work.

My creativity in the chicken pen is paying off.  I have 4 segments in the pen with one entirely devoted to growing green things including grass, weeds, horse radish, catnip, and mint.  Chickens don’t care for horseradish, oregano, or anything in the mint family so those things are allowed to grow creating an environment for more bugs and other nutritious activity for chickens.  I can close off each extra pen as needed in order for it to recover.  Inside of three of the segments there is one or more smaller cages that can be closed off to allow seasonal growth.  It is all quite complicated looking but the plan is working for better chicken nutrition without feeding the eagles and the coyotes.  I just have to work on those hawks.  The east border fence of the chicken pen holds a grape vine which now stretches to cover the chicken house during the hottest part of the season.  The grape vine provides shade, food, and disguise for the Land Commander (the chicken house).  

Where the hoop house used to be, I have carted off the debris and fenced in for a garden.  Since it is downhill from the chickens, heavy rains will erode the nutrient into my garden instead of into quack grass.  (Well, there is still a lot of quack grass but there will be garden too.) At the end of the growing season, I will be able to open a little door and let the chickens clean out my garden.  I have been unable to set them loose without losing chickens for the last 8 months.  A small hawk has joined the group of predators and has taken out one of my bantams from her pen.  I now have a crazy assortment of bowed PVC pipe swinging through the fence with pink ribbon.  It is highly unattractive both to me and predators alike.

I love it when you release your creativity and let it lead you into areas of self-fulfillment.  I know for a fact that Phyllis has been at work in her glorious creations and enjoying herself too.  Kari has been making huge progress here at my place.  I would love to hear how you are freeing your creativity and if you don’t want to write about it that’s okay too.  I want to encourage you to consider that creativity is crucial to your mental health and well-being.  You don’t have to be eccentric like me or farmer like Phyllis is turning into but you can take loppers like Kari does at my place and prune something in your yard that has been defying you.  You can paint, draw, write, dance, sing, walk backwards wherever you go, give the cat a hair-do or a bath, or simply arrange bits of nature into art.  Walking in Banner Forest I have often found leaves that somebody tears two eyes, a nose, and a mouth into.  It’s darned cute!

Sincerely, Carmen