As every craftsperson will tell you, it all begins by using only the very finest materials. We take great care to collect super-fresh sheep poo from the beautiful (and rainy) mountains of rural Wales and take it back to the mill, situated in southern Snowdonia. We don’t just make Sheep Poo Paper(tm) and for our other papers we use waste paper, rag and textile off-cuts and just about anything else we can think of that has good length cellulose fibers in it. Of course, we don’t use trees – we like trees.
The sheep poo we have collected is completely sterilized by boiling it in a specially designed pressure cooker at over 120 degrees centigrade (using only the purest Welsh mountain water, of course) and then washed repeatedly over a period of days until it has lost approximately half its original weight (Sheep Fact: a sheep only digests 50% of the cellulose fibers it eats).
It takes many hours to beat the cellulose fiber until it reduces to a pulp suitable for making paper. This is a difficult process to get right and the exact method is a closely guarded secret.
Using only traditional papermaking techniques we then form the pulp into sheets using special sieves (called a “mould and deckle”) and lay them out in stacks using felt in between each sheet to keep them from sticking together.
The stacked and felted sheets are then pressed under huge pressure to remove most of the remaining water and encourage the cellulose fibers to bond at a molecular scale – this is what gives the paper its strength. Hanging the paper up in the roof rafters of the mill to season them finishes off the drying process.
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