Peace paste

I love the way children respond to the creative process. I used to teach ceramics and sculpture classes after school and in the summer. What amazed me was that a child whom I knew to be distracted and unsuccessful in school could walk into the ceramics studio and become happily and peacefully engrossed in a project. (Adults respond in the same way when they can let go of product and focus on process.) Art has transformative powers to soothe the spirit and settle the body.

This week, we've been engaged in a particularly messy art process: paste paper. When a new volunteer stopped by to chat about the work she'll be doing in our classroom, I was up to my elbows in paste!

The children, though, were peacefully creating.
When everyone was settled with supplies, disagreements and tattling melted away, leaving the happy hum of imagination at work.

I discovered the joys of paste paper at a summer Book Arts Studio at The Museum of Printing History. You should have seen our little group of teachers happily creating beautiful messes—let go of product and focus on process.

Paste paper is made with powdered wallpaper paste. Surprisingly, this is not to be found at your local all-night hardware gigantistore (I naively assumed it would be so and visited several on a late night one-woman field trip around town)—check Ace Hardware or Sherwin Williams. Learn from my second mistake by heeding the directions and mixing the powder with warm water rather than the cold water available from the tap at your local elementary school. Shake the powder and the water in a large glass jar with a lid (“My paste smells like pickles!”) until it resembles the clear gel I applied to mosquito bites and sunburn as a kid (if you didn’t benefit from this magical anesthetic, think Aloe Vera). Mix small amounts with a drop or two of acrylic paints of your choice, and you’re ready for your very own paste paper party!

Use a popsicle stick, a sponge brush, or a paint brush to spread colored paste on a piece of paper (choose thick art paper or cardstock—paper that tolerates being wet).

Next, you get to use all those random objects you’ve been saving for something special, you just didn’t know what.
Now’s their chance to shine (and your chance to prove to loved ones that you were right to save a stash of trash)!

Combs,

forks,

corks, marbles, gelato shovels, railroad tracks—anything that might make an interesting pattern.

The only rules here are:
Have fun
and know when to leave it alone and get out a fresh piece of paper.

After the papers dry, you will probably need to iron them.

Use your decorative papers for anything you wish: bookmarks, the fly pages or cover of a handmade book, scrapbook supplies, etc. We’ll be using ours for homemade cards.

Robert Fulghum writes, “Maybe we should develop a Crayon bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A Beauty Bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode in the air—explode softly—and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth—boxes of Crayolas. And we wouldn’t go cheap, either—not little boxes of eight. Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in. With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest. And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination” (All I Ever Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten).

Pass the crayons . . . and the paste!