I recently took part in my second paper-making workshop with Mark Lander, a well-known Canterbury artist, who constructs sculptural artworks with paper made from New Zealand flax. Mark often paints his sculptures with naturally-coloured clays that he has collected from the local hills. Pictured here is a sculptural installation he made with very long sheets of flax paper.

As flax weavers know, flax has tough fibres and a very high fibre content. Indeed, some of the traditional forms of Māori weaving involve stripping flax right down to the pure fibre. For paper making, it is the high fibre content that makes flax a particularly suitable raw material.

For the technically-minded, when paper is made with any sort of plant fibre, the fibres lock together in a process called hydrogen bonding. Plants rely on cellulose for the strength in their branches and leaves, and paper is essentially a network of cellulose fibres held together by these hydrogen bonds.

Making paper with flax follows the same basic process as hand-making any sort of paper, and there are plenty of instructions for paper-making on the internet, most of which use scrap commercial paper as the raw material for hand-made paper. If one uses plant leaves for all or part of the raw materials, they can generally be softened enough for the first step in making paper by cutting them into small pieces and boiling them in water for a couple of hours, but flax is so tough it needs an extra step.

To reduce the flax into small pieces, Mark bashes the flax leaves with a piece of wood to begin to split them apart and soften them (which is quicker than stripping them right down to the fibre). He then cuts the leaves crosswise with a Stanley knife, leaving pieces about 5 mm long. Another option can be found in Making paper in New Zealand, a book by May Davis, which contains clear, easy-to-follow instructions for making flax paper. May does not bash the flax and suggests removing the hard midrib of the flax leaf and cutting the leaves into 1 cm pieces with scissors. The extra step in making paper with flax involves using a solution of caustic soda in a stainless steel pot. (If the pot is aluminium, it will be eaten away by the caustic soda and will give off flammable hydrogen gas.) You can buy solid caustic soda from a hardware store or supermarket. Handle it carefully and make it up into a solution, using about half a cup of caustic soda for a large potful of water.

Place the flax pieces in an empty stainless steel pot, and then add enough caustic soda solution to cover them. Boil the pieces about 40 minutes to an hour until they change colour. Alternatively, you can soak the pieces for a few days without boiling. Rinse the caustic soda from the pulp in a sieve under cold running water. From here on, you can follow standard paper-making instructions. If you want your paper to have an even texture you will need to run the blender for several minutes for each blender load. If you want a rough look with visible pieces of flax, you can miss out the blending operation for a small proportion of the pulp, and/or include a few longer pieces when you initially cut the flax pieces.

For those who want to make paper in bulk, Mark has developed and manufactures the Hollander beater shown here, which he sells and exports at a fraction of the cost of other manufacturers of Hollanders. The Hollander takes the place of a blender and pulps the fibres rather than slicing them, which results in a higher quality paper-making pulp.

In the workshop, we made large sheets of flax paper and left them in the sun to dry completely before peeling them off the frame. The other workshop participants were artists making paper to paint on. For my part, I’m not sure what I’ll use the paper for and am still awaiting inspiration. Mainly, I participated in the workshops to learn more about another use for flax, and found Mark’s workshops enjoyable as well as informative.
 

© Alison Marion Brown 2011.

This woven flax fantail — or Piwakawaka, a native bird of New Zealand — is an adaptation of a common woven bird design, and I’ve placed the instructions for weaving it on a separate web page, Weaving a flax fantail, because they are too long for a blog post. Weaving the flax fantail is reasonably straightforward, and it’s fun to see the bird take shape as you weave. Once the final touches of cutting the wings and tail feathers are completed, there’ll be a cheeky, flighty, little fantail for you to enjoy. For the fantail shown above I dyed the flax to match the fantail’s own colours and netted the flax to give it a feathery look, although the fantail is still cute if it is woven without dyed or netted flax. However, if you do want to use netted flax, Weaving a flax fantail includes instructions for netting flax, and some notes on weaving the fantail with netted, dyed flax.

It’s important to note that netting flax with a pasta machine is a patented process, so if you want to sell flaxworks made from netted flax you will need to purchase the netted flax from Hapene, the holder of the patent. However, in my limited knowledge of patent law, I think it’s fine to net flax with a pasta machine for one’s own use, and also to provide instructions for netting flax. At least I’m assuming it’s OK to provide instructions, because I saw instructions for netting flax with a pasta machine in a magazine some years ago. If any readers of this blog post have more knowledge about patent law than I do, please take the time to comment on this blog post.

Participants in my flax weaving workshops have often asked me about netting flax, and a couple of commenters on my blog have also enquired about it. Netted flax is very attractive and is particularly popular for foliage in flower arrangements and bouquets. It also seemed ideal as a way of matching the feathers of a fantail.

The inspiration for designing and weaving the fantail resulted from my experience of the Christchurch earthquake in February, when life turned upside down. I was in my workplace on the fourth floor of a city-centre building when the earthquake struck. The building was badly damaged and has been inaccessible ever since. My home in Sumner was also badly damaged, is unliveable and needs to be demolished.

Two days after the earthquake, as I drove around the Sumner estuary, I noticed shags drying their wings as they always do on a rocky outcrop, and later — when I was staying with one of my sons in a rural cottage — a pair of fantails flitted and flirted around the place, bringing a sense of joy and peace. Seeing these birds living life normally and happily inspired me back into creativity and the flax fantail is the result. Thank you to all those people throughout New Zealand who sent aroha and good wishes, and offered accommodation and holidays after the earthquake. Your thoughts were very welcome and much appreciated.

© Alison Marion Brown 2011.

Summer is the time for holidays, beachcombing, sun hats and plenty of free space for creativity. For me, it’s a time for putting into practice some of the weaving ideas I’ve had during the year and haven’t tried out, as well as a time for just playing around with weaving.

Hats are fun to decorate, and shells add a summery, seaside look to a hat. I found this broken shell on the beach at Ruby Bay, filled it with little flax flowers and attached it to the hat band. The natural bronze colour of the flax I used, which was growing by my camp site, happened to match the brown colour of the hat, although the colour will fade in time.

Adding natural objects to the rim of a bowl can create an interesting look. I found this smooth, twisted root on the beach and it was supple enough to wind around the top of a woven bowl. The top of the bowl was finished in a French plait, which leaves the ends of the plait straggling around the top on both the inside and outside of the bowl.

These ends are normally cut off. In this case, I cut off the outside ends and wove selected groups of four inside ends into four-plaits around the roots, which held them firmly in place at several spots around the rim. (If I had woven the outside ends into four-plaits, it would have distorted the rim of the bowl.)

I rather like smooth, curved driftwood pieces as handles for baskets. In the piece illustrated here, I wedged one end of the driftwood into the weaving to keep the handle upright and tied it on with fine plaits by drilling a small hole through each end of the handle and threading the plaits through the holes and then tying them though the weaving. This three-cornered basket, or waka kete, also features an oyster shell attached to a stone hanging on the side, as if it is an anchor.

Second edition of book

I have just released the second edition of my book, Weaving Flowers from New Zealand Flax. The new edition contains the same instructions as the first edition but also includes instructions for making a flax Pohutukawa, the flower of New Zealand’s Christmas tree. Real Pohutukawa flowers are stunning, but very delicate, and so not very practical for flower arrangements, but the flax version shown in this bouquet will last indefinitely. A variety of ideas for using the Pohutukawa are illustrated in the book, including instructions for making the hair decoration shown towards the bottom of Flax on the brain.

© Alison Marion Brown 2011.