I'd love to experiment more with botanicals of all sorts. Really the limiting factor here is how long it takes to make paper and my limited opportunities to get into a good studio space. No point in amassing hundreds of dried plant parts if I may not end up using them for months or even years. I'd rather spend more time gathering botanicals once I know I'll be able to make paper relatively consistently and in reasonable volume in the short-term future -- otherwise feels rather like putting the cart before the horse.

There are online resources about good plants to include. My main concern is what plants preserve well and what plants might be at risk for breaking down, growing stuff, or attracting bugs etc. So if anything I'd just do some googling to see if a given plant might not lend itself well to being included in the paper.

New paper is very wet and very weak. It has to be pressed dry between layers of another, dry, highly absorbent material. For 90% of drying I use blotter sheets which are just thick, heavy, absorbent white papers. Each sheet of new paper is sandwiched between 2 blotter pieces. You can stack the new paper sandwiches on top of each other as you make them. When your stack is done you'll want to apply weight/pressure which helps force the water out and also gives your paper better surface texture. I have a very nice wooden press that can crank like 500 lb of pressure evenly over a drying stack of fresh papers.

The issue I'm running into is quantity of blotters. I have probably like 200 blotter sheets. You have to change blotters in your drying stack regularly (I was changing 1x the first 3-4 days) because otherwise they'll start growing mold and once you have paper mold you just have to give up whatever paper stuff it's gotten into, basically.

Once you switch out your old wet blotters for new dry ones, then you have to figure out some way to get those wet/damp blotters dry again, either so you can switch them back into your drying stack of new papers or start making new-new paper again.

Seriously, that's the thing I realized this time about paper making -- how much drying of how many parts is necessary. Dry the new paper with blotters. Then gotta dry the blotters. Gotta dry old blotters every time I switch them out. In a day, all my dry new blotters will be wet and old again.

My rough math is I need about 6-8x blotters for each new paper sheet I want to make. At this point buying another pack of 25 allows me to make...what, 3-4 more sheets of paper in a session? That is not substantial. Moreover blotters get damaged too and have to be replaced...100 more blotter papers doesn't feel like it would make enough difference to the volume of my papermaking to shell out another $75 now that I've done so a few times already.

The paper will dry with the best finish/smoothness when dried under pressure. Adding heat is tricky; without the press, heat will wrinkle and curl the pages significantly. So for now I pull my press into direct sunlight, but in the AC inside because that is substantially less humid than outside (and, remember, mold) and I switch blotters and I find places to lay them out in sunlight and let them dry too and I wait.

For the covers I think I want to do some more scenes and collages. I was thinking about what market book covers look like and they often have a scene or image on them. I thought maybe I should experiment more with that.

You can click through to that post I linked above and see some of my collage covers (some of my favorites).

I also made some newsprint covers and liked those a lot too. Who knows? But I am just leaning towards, paper to recycle paper, and if I want to recycle fabric, maybe the best way to do that is to re-use it as fabric. Not "paper" aka "book covers."