For many years we carried two products for helping with pigment retention in handmade paper: our Retention Agent and our Scavenger. Both were cationic agents (that is, they developed positive electric charge in water), which attracted them both to the…
Author: kpmartin
More carp, live ones this time, and an eagle
The other day, I was walking along Alder Creek, which runs behind our property here in New Dundee, and I happened to spot a group of around 40 carp, just swimming gently to keep up with the current. The water…
CBBAG Ottawa Valley Book Arts Show and Sale, May 16th, 2020
The Ottawa Valley chapter of The Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild (CBBAG) will be holding their biennial(ish) Book Arts Show and Sale on Saturday, May 16th, 2020. Unlike the previous few shows, which were held at the Glebe Community…
Power chute control for John Deere 185 snow blower
My JD185 lawn tractor can be fitted with a snowblower attachment. The one I have has no part or model number; it is just called the “38 inch snowblower” in the manuals. At the driver’s seat there is a crank…
Tagged with: JD185
Repairing our old Ironer (Mangle)
We have a near-antique Easy brand ironer (also known as a mangle). This has a cloth-covered roller and a heated platen that presses against it, and it would have originally been used for ironing (typically) large items like bedsheets. We…
A Pump Stroke Counter for the Monotype Caster
I recently installed a pump stroke counter on my Monotype Composition caster, which will prove very useful when casting spacing and fonts of display type (fonts of composition type can be produced using the paper ribbon or computer interface). The…
BOUND Book Arts Fair, December 8th 2019 in Toronto
The Papertrail will be participating in the third edition of the BOUND Book Arts Fair, on Sunday, December 9th, 2019. The fair will be held from 11am to 5 pm in the Arts and Letters Club, 14 Elm Street (a…
A Film About George Walker
There is a Kickstarter campaign on to help finance a film entitled “Woodwriter: The Wordless Art of George A. Walker.” The project was initiated by photographer and filmmaker Jeff Winch. George is a good friend of ours, whom we see at…
Tagged with: George Walker
Updated listing of available handset type
I just brought home a large lot of new (to me) matrices, mostly Lanston display matrices, and I’ve updated our list of available fonts to include these. Many of these fill in gaps in the sizes for faces already offered,…
Another new pulp: Hemp/Cotton Rag blend
We have a batch (around 150kg) of pulp which is a blend of cotton rag and our raw hemp fibre. The hemp has not been cooked so this is purely a mechanical pulp. It still contains the shives (bits of…
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