Making wildflower seeded paper

I attended an online class hosted by Frederick Book Arts Center "Gardener's Blizzard Book".  The book artist Catherine Cross Tsintzos presented information on book binding and paper making techniques to create a Gardener's Blizzard Book with handmade and hand dyed paper.

The Blizzard book is a complicated folding of a long strip of paper to create a series of pockets that can act as a book spine to hold additional pages.  This book design was developed by Hedi Kyle.  I found a wonderful blog that discusses the book form and as well as a video that shows how to do do the folds very clearly.  I am not going to be using the Blizzard book I made to hold my seed pages (I have a different use for them).  However, this is a very cool book design and I will be using it in other projects.  

This is my first attempt at making paper.  I used a food processor to convert torn paper into wet pulp.  I transferred the pulp to a water filled VAT (really just a big shallow pan).  I sprinkled dried wildflower seeds I had collected last fall on top of the water.

I carefully lowered my small deckle box into the vat, and slowly raised it to the surface while gently shaking it to distribute the pulp and seeds evenly. 

After pressing most of the water out of the pulp, I opened the deckle box and transferred the wet pulpy seed paper to a glass sheet to dry.  When the paper was dry I carefully pealed it off of the glass pane.  

Take aways from my first try at paper making:

• Add more pulp to the VAT - or the paper will be very thin
• The glass has to be VERY clean - or the paper will stick 
• It would be nice to have some color - dye or dried flower petals
• It is not as messy as it looks and it is lots of fun

Final note.  I used up the left over pulp and seeds in the vat by making a few small seed bombs.