A couple months ago, I attended a zoom presentation about making vegetable papyrus, with artist Yuka Petz. Yuka does a lot of cool stuff, which you can see on her website,
www.yukapetz.com. We met at PBI one time, like, maybe a decade ago? Fun times. Gawd, seems like forever. Yuka is also now hosting a wonderful video series called '
Artist's Books Unshelved' which you can view on Youtube.
So, the vegetable papyrus demo was a great introduction to the process. Yuka provided a lot of incredibly useful information and tips on how to get started making this stuff and my first expiriments were quite successful, all things considered.
I started with celery and apples. I used celery because I thought the long stalks might result in something similar to Egyptian papyrus. I also tried the apples, mainly because I just had apples on hand!
This next photo shows the cooked celery before it was pressed, and then the resulting papyrus after all the pressing and drying.
Drying time was surprisingly long. A couple weeks actually. Though, I'm sure that's largely due to the natural humidity living near the ocean and whatnot. So, these are the most successful pieces from my first round of papyrus making:
I'm planning to raid the rhubarb patch in a couple months and try making papyrus with that!
Update:
Well, I tried using rhubarb and the results were disappointing. Rhubarb falls apart too quickly during cooking and it was very difficult to work with. I recommend that you stick with the veggies that will retain their shape during cooking.
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