Why Is My Recycled Handmade Paper Grey or Dingy?

Your recycled sheet dried dull and flat in tone, or it is peppered with small dark specks. It may look fine in the vat and disappoint once it dries.

Printed paper is the usual suspect. Paper mills use a separate deinking process to detach ink from the fibre and carry it away, and better ink removal lowers the dirt count and raises the brightness of the pulp. A home vat has no such step.

Separate it from two look-alikes.

• If the color is fine but the sheet looks patchy against the light, that is formation.
• If the sheet looks fine and crumbles when you handle it, the problem is weak fibre. Newspaper can cause both: Nash avoids its greasy ink, and Tasillo calls its fibre short and acidic.

If you like a muted sheet, none of this needs fixing. The checks below matter only if you wanted something cleaner.

Change one thing per batch. Keep the blend time and vat ratio constant, and dry the test sheets side by side.

1. Write down the scrap. Note every kind of paper that went into the batch.
2. Make a clean control. Blend a small batch of unprinted paper and pull a sheet. This shows what your water and your gear do by themselves.
3. Add one source at a time. Make small batches from each kind of scrap and label them.
4. Sort by color. If the sheet is muddy rather than speckled, try a batch from one color only.
5. Check the specks. Look at a wet sheet. Specks that are already there came from the pulp. Spots that show up later may be mould growth.
6. Check your gear. Couch a sheet on a clean, undyed cloth and see if the marks disappear.

Choose lighter scrap

Mary Tasillo writes that the quality of the finished paper depends largely on the paper going into the blender. Catherine Nash advises saving photocopy paper only, for best results, because glossy stock and newspaper carry greasy ink.

May Babcock recommends drawing, printmaking, and watercolor papers, because they are generally made from stronger fibres. Tear off printed margins if you can.

Keep newspaper and glossy stock out

Tasillo calls the paper she made from newspaper the saddest she has made, because of its short, acidic wood fibre. Coated paper for magazines carries a coating of china clay or chalk. Make: notes that magazine pages and glossy papers chop up more irregularly, giving a more "artistic" look. That can be interesting, but it won't be clean.

Remove what does not belong

Pick out tape, staples, plastic windows, stickers, and labels before you soak the paper. Babcock's rule is no plastic. In mills, adhesives from tape and labels form stickies, soft rubbery particles that are hard to remove and contaminate the recycled paper.

Add better paper

Tasillo notes that recycling better paper, such as 100% cotton rag papers or scraps of high-quality handmade paper, dramatically improves the finished sheet. Mixing some into a batch of printed scrap also means less ink in each sheet.

Sort the colors

Nash divides her scrap into color families before she tears it up. If you want a particular color, Make: suggests dyeing the pulp.

Keep separate gear for dyed pulp

Felts stain easily from dyes and pigments. Tom Bannister suggests keeping a second set for colored pulp. Rinse the vat and mould after each session so yesterday's dye and pulp do not end up in today's sheet.

• Keep separate bins for unprinted, lightly printed, and heavily printed scrap.
• Label test sheets with their source paper.
• Set aside a stack of clean offcuts for the batches where color matters.
• Note the scrap mix in your batch log.

A sheet that has dried dingy will stay that way. You cannot rinse the ink out of a finished sheet, so re-pulp it with lighter scrap if the color matters.

Deinking and bleaching are industrial processes that use chemicals, and home versions are not covered on this site. If you need a truly bright white sheet, start with clean cotton linters or unprinted rag, not recycled printed paper.