News Paper Molds

Making a short story long:
My niece had a birthday party a few weeks ago, and with our tight budget I thought it would be great if my kids and I could make her some home-made jewelery! I looked online for clay recipes, but then realized we were out of salt! One of the key things in making those clays... so then I wondered what different ideas there were to use newspapers to make beads. I found this site: A Story Book Life and they had this awesome post about how to make beads out of recycled newspaper. I was just thrilled! This was perfect.
Well, I didn't like the texture of those beads very well, but I figured maybe if I did it a little differently I could get a smoother texture? Anyway... Rather than bore you to tears about what I did and tried and the fact that we didn't end up getting things just right for the birthday gift... I did end up coming up with a great variation on the recipe and technique that I like quite a lot and can't wait to do it again!

First, I took the paper as they said to on their site and tore it up into tiny little pieces. ( I wish I had taken pictures of my process but didn't think about it at the time.)

Once I had my large sauce pan full of paper pieces I filled the pan with water. more than enough to cover the paper and then some.

I brought the water to a boil on the stove then reduced the heat and let it simmer (covered) for about an hour or so, stirring occasionally. About half way through the simmering, I added red food coloring to the pan to help the paper pulp have a more even coloring when it was done. I used about 20 drops of red food color.

Once it was done simmering, I let it cool completely (I actually let mine sit on the stove covered overnight, because I didn't get to it till later that day, and was too tired to try to do anything with it then)

You'll want to drain as much water out of the paper as you can, I used my pasta strainer and some pressure. Reserve about half a cup of water.

Add flour to the water you set aside, I used somewhere between 1 cup to 1 1/2 cups. Mix this well until you have a smooth paste. Then add the flour paste into the newspaper pulp, mixing until evenly blended.

Once I did that, I tried a million different ways to make beads and I hated them all! But didn't want to waste all my hard work, so I went to my drawer and got out my letter cookie cutters!

I placed the cookie cutter on an old towel (one I didn't care too mush about) Then I took a generously sized blob of paper mush, and pressed it into the cookie cutter as hard as I could, adding more mush if I needed too. Be sure and press as much water out of the pulp as you possibly can at this point... it will help with the drying process.

Once I had the cutter, or mold, filled to capacity, I removed any excess paper pulp from the edges and popped the shaped pulp onto some freezer paper to dry. After a couple days, they are ready to paint!

I just used regular craft paints that I had laying around:

And this is what it looked like when I was all finished:

I made letter banners for each of my children's bedroom doors. I'm so excited, I can't even stand it! :) I think it turned wicked cute!!!

So that concludes my first idea on what to do with all of those newspapers that you get... just to use the coupons inside!!! And if you are like me, you don't even read the paper itself. So it's nice that it can be good for something.

Happy saving... and happy recycling! :)