The Wompoo Papers

The Wompoo Papers

If Tasmania could produce lovely paper from kangaroo poo,
why couldn't I do something similar - but different?
WOMBAT POO PAPER! (it seemed like a good idea at the time)

Wombats eat grass, and grass makes lovely paper after it's been cooked,
so I figured the wombats would have already done half the work before I took over!

Pristine white paper didn't look quite right, so I dyed it all with tea.
The lettering on the title page and cover patch was done with a brush
and the rest of it with a steel nib - up to page 25, when I surrendered to the computer.
A pointed nib was used for the line drawings and all hand lettering was done with
freshly ground Japanese stick ink.

This is the story of how it all panned out.

Somehow a couple of pages ended up numbered incorrectly.

This is the other incorrectly numbered page, but at least they were in the right place!

The end

You wouldn't believe how the smell of the cooking pot permeated the whole house
and how long it took to disappear!

It was a mammoth task this year, and with only a limited quantity of pure wombat poo paper,
plus the fact that it lacked strength on its own and was better combined with other plant fibre,
some of the book covers were either a combination or solely grass paper.
Each book does contain a small sample of pure wompoo paper on page 23.

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