How to Recycle Your Own Paper! - The Easy Way

Hi everybody! So today I wanted to share with you how we recycle our own paper. The kids love doing art and I don't like inhibiting them from being able to do so, but at the same time we go through a lot of this type of construction paper. So I'm going to be sharing with you a very super simple way that you can recycle and reuse all this art paperwork for more art. The first thing that I've started doing is I've made a bowl of water and I'm taking all of my paper that I want to recycle and soaking it in here. We use all kinds of things from paper that I use, old printer paper, even some paper from coloring books, and it makes a nice blend. You want to soak this for about 30 minutes. So once everything has been soaked, you can tell because this paper just starts to fall apart really easy. It's nice and soft. So what we're going to do is we're going to take it and place it in our blender. You want to get a good mix of water and paper in the blender and we're just going to try to turn this thing on. So we've got this nice pulpy mess here. They're super soft. Can you say super soft for me one more time? Anyways, I have a screen set up here. It's just an extra piece of screen like what you have on your windows in a tray, which is just a cookie sheet. And what we do is we just kind of like pulp this on here and kind of spread it out nice and thin. How come this is like really fat compared to what we did before? Did I not blend it enough? I feel like I'm doing this wrong now. I told you this was super easy, but I think that we have too much pulp and too little water. So I put more water in and I stirred it all up and this is what it looks like when it's pretty evenly diluted. The screen is at the bottom and what we're going to do is we're going to pick it up just like this and we're going to gently move it over to this towel over here. You want to drain as much as you can in the pan first and it would be super easy if you were doing it with a frame and the screen. Now we got really lazy because last time we did it without the frame and it worked fine. So once you do that, transfer it over to a towel, press it down, and then you can iron the top towel to try to remove more of the excess water. I've also heard that you can use a what was it a liquid stabilizer what was that no a starch a liquid starch so that it bleeds less when if you want to actually write on it. But I haven't noticed the kids having any trouble writing on it with felt tip markers. It doesn't seem to bleed much. So we've got it sandwiched in between a couple of towels here as you can see and we've ironed it. We've switched out the top towel once because it was pretty super wet. Again I think with a with the frame method you might be able to get some more of the water out before you actually lay it on the towel. We're going to peel it off and we're going to lay that out on the counter or another dry pan or a piece of wood anything flat. It's surprising that it peels off. You'd think it would just like get stuck to the screen and not want to come off but for whatever reason the stuff peels off. Now it is pretty fragile at the moment but see all that cool fleck that's the cool fleck that Marin was talking about. It looks like there's even some glue in that one some glitter sparkle glue there but I mean it's going to be a pretty piece of paper though. Yeah and then some people even take a pan or a piece of wood and they'll press it on top of that at this point just to flatten it out and I mean people get picky. It doesn't take long to dry. I think someplace else it might but it's pretty dry where we live. That one turned out pretty good sweetie I'm excited for that. Me too. Yeah that's good. So this paper is pretty much almost dry right now and as you can see if you don't put like a book or anything flat on it it has this really awesome look to it and I just love it the way that it is but you can cut the edges to make it more straight and look at how pretty that is. You guys ready to use it for some special artwork? Maybe make some cards for your grandmas? Okay so half for you Evie and here's your half love. There you go. Anyways that is how you make your own paper at home by recycling old paper. It is quite time-consuming but it comes out really fun. She said at the beginning this was easy. Easy is different than time-consuming. So if you make your own paper take some pictures, tweet it to us, show us what you guys come up with. I know that his mom put like some confetti and stuff like recycled confetti. Write something loving and send it to a friend. Yep. Have a good one guys. We'll see you next time.