Catching Up: The Paper Museum

As I suspected, our life is way too complicated to post regularly. I don't know how the "A-List" Bloggers do it; I'm too busy living my life to blog it each day!

However, I will attempt to catch up every now and then.

One step towards doing that is documenting (briefly) a trip we made to the Paper Museum in Silkeborg.



We found this museum quite by accident. We were actually on our way back to our car, ready to leave, when we noticed that the town's performing arts center was open and we went in to prepare the kids for the drive back to Aarhus (i.e. take Max to the bathroom). Inside (in addition to the bathrooms) we found a cafe that was busy serving a late lunch to people and the paper museum.

The paper museum is situated where Silkeborg's paper factory used to be and this was the site that produced all of the paper used in the creation of Danish money for quite some time (that responsibility has since moved to Copenhagen) in addition to other paper products, specializing in the creation of paper with watermarks, such as the one shown below.



The museum was filled with examples of the types of paper created by the factory as well as all the machinery needed to make the paper itself. Indeed the page above was created by Max, as shown below:



The pool of water in front of Max in the picture above is filled with cotten fibers; those fibers set quickly (something that needs to be seen to be believed) when the tablet is lifted out of the water. You gently shake the tablet back and forth to get rid of excess water and then move the tablet to a table with a specially fitted hose in the middle of it. Once the tablet is placed on top of this hose, you push a peddle under the table to turn on a vacuum (powered by the pumps below) that finishes the setting of the fibers and causes the watermark to appear.



The watermark appears because the bottom of the tablet contains a metal plate with the watermark cut into it. When the vacuum is applied, the fibers above the watermark "hole" are pulled down further than the rest of the fibers causing the watermark to appear in the paper itself. After the watermark has been created, the tablet is placed upside down on a thick piece of wool where the newly created piece of paper is transferred out of the tablet.



Here's a video of Max making a piece of paper starting at a point where he has just pushed the peddle to create the watermark until the paper has been transferred to begin the process of drying.



Once they have created a stack of 100 of these things (with two pieces of paper each) they are apparently pressed to remove any excess water still remaining in the pages and then the paper is placed either in a drying machine or hung up to dry.

We found the process of making paper fascinating and really enjoyed our unplanned trip to the museum!