Thread: Paper?

the real process is long, but you can cheat a little. Find some heavy stock paper - soak it in tea/coffee/soy/or other dark liquids. If you want additional aging - you can gently crumple it while wet and then smoothe it out to dry afterwards.

you can also buy parchment like paper in well assorted arts and crafts shops

True but I'd rather dive into the time it took back in the day to do something that will have my players gm for be like O.O. Cause true role players love real items real things made. It just adds to the epicness. I make swords for a hobby and I would like to dive in to this feild and I am sure it would perk the eyes of this forum once I post a tut when I do it. I just need some help to understand the way it needs to be done

I'm sure you can google it, or find a book on paper making in the library
I'd love to see and hear about it - and cool with the swords too... got pics anywhere?

I'll for sure post of pictures of my swords once I fix my forge o.o we had a small gas leak lets say. (Yes gas is better then coal all though its new school sadly coal can do major nerve damage to you.) I think for now I am more focused on the paper so far this is what I got from wiki

"Parchment is prepared from pelt, i.e., wet, unhaired, and limed skin, simply by drying at ordinary temperatures under tension, most commonly on a wooden frame known as a stretching frame".[4] After being flayed, the skin is soaked in water for about 1 day. This removes blood and grime from the skin and prepares it for a dehairing liquor.[5] The dehairing liquor was originally made of rotted, or fermented, vegetable matter, like beer or other liquors, but by the Middle Ages an unhairing bath included Lime. Today, the lime solution is occasionally sharpened by the use of sodium sulfide. The liquor bath would have been in wooden or stone vats and the hides stirred with a long wooden pole to avoid contact with the alkaline solution. Sometimes the skins would stay in the unhairing bath for 8 or more days depending how concentrated and how warm the solution was kept—unhairing could take up to twice as long in winter. The vat was stirred two or three times a day to ensure the solution's deep and uniform penetration. Replacing the limewater bath also sped the process up. However, if the skins were soaked in the liquor too long, they would be weakened and not able to stand the stretching required for parchment.[5]

After soaking in water to make the skins workable, the skins were placed on a stretching frame. A simple frame with nails would work well in stretching the pelts. The skins could be attached by wrapping small, smooth rocks in the skins with rope or leather strips. Both sides would be left open to the air so they could be scraped with a sharp, semi-lunar knife to remove the last of the hair and get the skin to the right thickness. The skins, which were made almost entirely of collagen, would form a natural glue while drying and once taken off the frame they would keep their form. The stretching allowed the fibers to become aligned running parallel to the grain."

Yeah, I was going to say. True parchment or vellum is made from hides. I think it is going to be a smelly process, think tannery. But if you do it I'd love to see pictures of the process.

Anything other than wood pulp paper (or things carefully crafted to be like it) won't feed through a printer so you'd have to do all the work by hand. I'm told such a technique lacks an undo feature, which is critical to my workflow. As has been pointed out, you can get various types of paper such as the modern vellum substitute from many craft stores, including online ones. Most folks are much lazier and just use pictures of the real things as backgrounds for their maps and possibly post-process the paper to get the desired texture and stains.

I once did the iron gall ink burnthrough and tattered paper thing for my players. They were less than amused when their map for the adventure crumbled away as they tried to unfold it.

Originally Posted by waldronate

I once did the iron gall ink burnthrough and tattered paper thing for my players. They were less than amused when their map for the adventure crumbled away as they tried to unfold it.

*lol* I could imagine... and I feel you about the undo function, that's definitly a thing I missed when I (once upon a time) painted on canvas.

Sounds like a long, smelly process - but as hohum says, if you're up for it - please share your stories and pictures

... and dont forget those pics of your swords....

If you really want to make old-fashioned parchment, you first need to have a source of raw animal hides. Deer, goat and sheep hides are thin enough and strong enough for parchment. I don't know where you live, but deer hides are often available for free during hunting season. (If you know the right hunters!)

A good source of information is a tanning forum called The Hide Out! ( http://www.braintan.com/hideout/index.htm ) It's been a long time since I was there, but they had some good threads on making parchment.