Papel de girasol: variación del proceso con bicarbonato de sodio

Hi everyone 🌻
It has been almost a year since we launched the course. It has been wonderful to share the experience of papermaking with all of you 💚. Many of you wondered if the fibers could be cooked with something different than soda, so I tried cooking it with sodium bicarbonate (since it is easier to manipulate than caustic soda) and I decided to post this experiment as the project.
This time I cut the sunflower stalks into smaller pieces than the ones in the video, to make it easier to blend the cooked fiber.

I cooked the sunflowers (1 kg) for 2 hours (after the water boiled) with 20% of sodium bicarbonate (maybe a lower percentage would also work). The stalks were pretty fresh.
As a comparison, you can see in the photo the fibers after cooking them with caustic soda and with sodium bicarbonate (the water was much darker with the soda, meaning that more "compounds" were separated from the cellulose fibers).
The one on the left was cooked with 10% of soda for 1 hour.

The next day (after the cooking) I washed the "bicarbonate" fibers and blended them for 3 minutes (in about 5-6 batches). Remember that the "soda" fibers were blended for 1 minute.
I also used basil leaves for a green dye and the avocado seed for a reddish one.
I mixed some diluted corn starch with the "bicarbonate" fiber in suspension.
After forming the sheets, I left them drying directly on the moulds~

The "bicarbonate" paper came out pretty well! It has more texture than the "soda" one and is a little bit translucent. I think the starch helped to give it more body but it is pretty strong by itself 🔥

Finally, I sewed a booklet with some papers with basil leaves 🌿 and with the avocado dye 🥑

If you are reluctant to use caustic soda, you can try this variation with sodium bicarbonate!
The next step will be to try cooking other fibers with sodium bicarbonate 🔥